New Industrial Building at the Brooklyn Navy Yard
Brooklyn, NY


The building is wrapped by two main ecosystems, a coastal forest and an open meadow. These landscapes recall the area’s original coastal marshlands and contribute significantly to water and air quality as well as carbon sequestration. Offsetting their industrial environs, these garden spaces also provide green relief and seasonal interest for the immediate surroundings and the building’s users.

Several key sustainable strategies are embedded in the landscape design: Rain water is collected form impervious surfaces and then channeled through the landscape, providing irrigation before arriving in a wet meadow infiltration garden.
Florham Park Complex
Florham Park, NJ


Proposed Bluestem meadows and restorative plantings around the existing creek will increasing the amount of critical nesting and foraging habitat for rare avian and invertebrate species of special concern. Additional proposed tree plantings will provide viable roosting and nesting habitat and create connective patches within the matrix of the site, enhancing biodiversity, a key to the ecological health of the site. The central plaza is a continuation of these habitats within a formalized geometry, maximizing all open space for ecological processes.

Kathleen Bakewell was the project manager and lead landscape architect for this project while employed at Balmori Associates, prior to founding Brook Farm Group.
Boutique Hotel
Brooklyn, NY


The new hotel is at the heart of one of NYC’s most celebrated up and coming neighborhoods, noted for its indie, hipster vibe and creative arts scene. The hotel’s design and program embody and embrace this spirit with porous and welcoming edges and reinterpretations and adaptations of local artifacts and culture.

At the same time, the hotel’s bars, restaurants and lounges infuse the neighborhood with fresh ideas and eclectic juxtapositions. From season to season and year to year, the décor and landscape change and surprise, with the momentum and dynamism of the streets where it lives.

The landscape design symbolizes this energy with its intentional mobility and seasonal expression. It moves, climbs, and descends, changing it both subtle and dramatic ways. Inserted into the building's reveals, crawling over surfaces, popping up among the tables and chairs, the plants are living, colorful characters in the daily life of eat, drink, work, play.