The Story of Gardening
The Newt in Somerset
Bringing complex exhibition concepts to fruition requires great skill and experience, and our decades of expertise played a vital role in developing South African tech billionaire Koos Bekker’s vision for a museum on the historic estate in Somerset, which he acquired in 2013.
We were recruited by Koos at the earliest stage of this project to flesh out his dream of a garden museum as a key element of his proposed 800-acre leisure and hospitality destination – a new twist on the luxury food and landscape-led attraction he had successfully developed in South Africa, in Babylonstoren hotel and farm.
With no narratives to draw on, apart from the history of the estate’s Grade II listed Georgian manor - home to famous garden designer Penelope Hobhouse and her family for 200 years - our ingenuity was deployed over 18 months of intensive brainstorming and collaboration.
Real Studios conjured multiple storylines and interpretive masterplanning options, and then developed the preferred concepts through to scheme design. These ideas underpinned the subsequent creative work behind The Story of Gardening, which opened in September 2019.
Our role:
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Interpretation masterplanning
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Exhibition design
