Ella’s Garden Rowcroft Hospice
An on-going project for a care home village in Torquay. The historic site contains two large 19th and early 20th century villas, remnants of the historic garden layout including a boating lake backfilled during WWII and around 400 trees, 155 of which have TPOs.
We have been involved from the outset working closely with the hospice staff and community, PRP Architects and many specialists consultants to develop a site-wide masterplan to accommodate a new hospice (IPU), care homes with their own private gardens, and assisted living accommodation. The concept is a ‘village’ with a main ‘street’, village green, village square, a pre-school nursery, shops, café’s, a restaurant, areas for horticultural therapy, recreational facilities and pleasure gardens.
The concept includes multiple biodiversity enhancement solutions: A lake, ponds, swales, native trees and scrub planting, meadows, arboretum (with species selected for climate resilience) beekeeping, and management regimes which create a largely self-sustaining series of habitats.
The project won the award for design excellence at the national Planning Awards 2024.
LOCATION: Torquay
CLIENT: Private
…Located on a challenging hilltop site, the redevelopment of Rowcroft’s 23 acre site in Torquay will provide an exemplary, intergenerational continuing care community which will extend and improve Rowcroft’s exceptional care offer for South Devon. The proposal will add to Rowcroft’s existing hospice to deliver a world class in-patient hospice, out-patient services, staff training, a 60 bed dementia care home, children’s nursery, 40 assisted living apartments, guest lodges, beautiful landscape and horticulture. The masterplan is landscape led with a central village green and routes which provide clear visual connections, celebrating two retained properties and extending their setting. (source: PRP Architects).