This summer sees a five-year vision come to life: a Cornish eco-cabin landscape combining sustainable living with ecologically minded design. On a former airfield in North Cornwall, Koto at the Point is the latest addition to award-winning resort development The Point at Polzeath. It comprises 17 ‘eco-lodge’ cabins set within 11 of The Point’s 240 acres, a gently sloping landscape of diverse trees, meadow, and bright perennials, stitched together by over 400m of traditional slate-and-soil Cornish walling.
Explore a leafy Cornish eco-cabin landscape designed by Darren Hawkes
Sustainability-minded since taking on The Point in 2012 – transforming its golf course and health club amenities and adding environment-conscious self-catering apartments – owners Eva and Jeremy Davies wanted this next project to be yet more future-facing. 'We wanted to leave a legacy,' explains Eva, 'to be able to walk away and be proud of what we’d made.' Gearing the development around the core principles of habitat provision, biodiversity increase and climate resilience, Koto at the Point was an opportunity for the couple to steward the land. 'It’s been a bigger challenge than we ever thought it would be,' says Jeremy, 'but it’s something that we can feel incredibly proud of.'
Koto at the Point’s origins began in 2020, during the first pandemic lockdown, where, in a sense, one form of cabin fever led to another. With an idea forming to build a range of modern, sustainable, Scandinavian-style holiday cabins within a landscape rooted in its local surroundings, Eva had discovered Devon-based architecture and design studio Koto, and felt their principles aligned. 'Growing up in Norway, I spent a lot of time outside, whether in the mountains, the sea, or the woods,' she explains.
'The architects at Koto had worked in a Norwegian practice in Oslo for ten years and were very familiar with the sense of indoor-outdoor living, and the word ‘Friluftsliv’ – ‘free air living’ – which is ingrained in the Norwegian vocabulary. That’s why I fell in love with the Koto concept, and how they came to design the cabins.' Early in the project’s development, Koto co-founder Theo Dales introduced the Davies to award-winning, Cornwall-based landscape designer Darren Hawkes, with whom the practice had previously collaborated. 'When Darren presented his first plans – including the 400m of walls snaking through the site – it was a big moment. We just fell in love straightaway with everything he put on paper.'
Operating from a studio in Fowey, on the south coast of Cornwall, Hawkes' work encompasses everything from townhouse gardens and country retreats to 2026’s gold-winning Chelsea show garden and a new Maggie’s garden at Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Stirlingshire. In the case of Koto at the Point, it was the opportunity to be involved from the project’s outset that first attracted him, right down to pegging out where the cabins would be sited. 'Normally an architect has already decided where a building will be placed, so to be able to really think about how people would live within and relate to the landscape was really exciting,' he says. 'Alongside the fact that Jeremy and Eva wanted to do this at such a high level, with a massive commitment to nature.'
Working collaboratively with an ecologist, Hawkes reconfigured the flat, roughly rectangular and formerly closely mown airfield into a more dynamic topography. 'I wanted to break it up as much as possible,' he explains, 'cutting and filling, and creating the sense of a little envelope around each building.' While a central swale directs rainwater runoff towards an irrigation pond at the bottom of the site, the three curving walls (known as ‘Cornish hedges’ – a protected characteristic of the Cornish countryside) add further complexity to the landscape.
Handcrafted by a local contractor and planted with wildflowers and structural shrubs, these provide exceptional habitat for invertebrates, birds and small mammals. The real masterstroke of landscape design, however, is in the avoidance of hard boundaries. 'The walls divide and split up various sections, but then we use areas of rough grass, meadow, lawn, and garden spaces as a further buffer between cabins,' Darren explains. 'Meandering paths allow people staying here to walk through the site, taking them through openings in the walls in a way that feels playful, particularly for children. Yet it becomes clear where you start to veer into private space.'
Intimately familiar with the environmental conditions particular to England’s south-west peninsula, Hawkes has found something of a natural design niche with coastal gardens. 'Most of our projects in Cornwall and Devon are adjacent to the sea, so understanding how to build and maintain gardens in these environments is something we’ve learned a lot about; we’re continually learning what survives close to the sea.' This knowledge played directly into the tree and large shrub selections Hawkes made for the site, including characterful, often multi-stemmed specimens of spindle, pine, dogwood and juniper, sourced from tree nursery New Wood Trees in Totnes.
So far, over 130 trees have gone into the site, says Jeremy, and their density will be increased year on year. 'We’re surrounded by a lot of farmland here in North Cornwall, so just to be planting trees in an area where there aren’t many is wonderful,' he adds. Ensuring their establishment, alongside that of the meadows, lawns, and elegant pocket gardens of colourful heleniums, sea hollies and soft ornamental grasses – which are set so beautifully against the black of the cabins – is head gardener Natalie Buse and The Point’s head greenkeeper, Tom Collings.
Though the life of this landscape will mature and develop over decades, its component parts are beginning to coalesce already, after only a few years, settling sympathetically into the surrounding coastal countryside. Poppies and daisies spill from the walls; architectural trees are framed through the cabin glass. Returning to monitor the site’s biodiversity, ecologist John Sproull recently recorded an encouraging wealth of wildlife, from painted lady and meadow brown butterflies to goldfinches and meadow pipits.
Koto cabin owners have delighted, too, in seeing deer pass through the site, Jeremy says. 'We feel very privileged to have been working with Darren on this project; he fully understood what we were looking to do, just as we understood what he wanted to create.' For Eva, it’s now a moment for taking stock. 'When we stop and look at what we’ve created, sitting in one of the cabins and looking out at the hedges and trees we’ve planted, it feels such a privilege to have been able to do this.'
