The BOH Visitor Center will provide visitors to the estate opportunities to view and appreciate the landscape. This “building” would not only address the Owner and operator’s requirements to meet certain sales targets, it was also there to house the existing tea shop and improve the visitor facilities.
It is well worth knowing finally that the best experience of a building can actually be achieved through mere disposition and not entirely on detailing or indeed resolution of a design through construction techniques alone. BOH was totally about placing a simple path to lin an arrival experience atop a hill to a destination point at the end of an enclosed space, which is the old factory where tea is observed made by hand.
It was never intended to displace or rehouse any of the existing structures and facilities in this Visitor Center: it was more of collecting the various buildings into a single unified whole. The alignment of the building footprint became critical, and the execution of this gesture to leave things as they are, resulted in a form that appears to be completely natural, completely belonging to the place. It is now hard to believe the new structure had not been there for the 50 years or so before it was built. This is probably the most rewarding and notable experience.