Old Rectory Gardens – Book Design
the brief…
To design a beautiful, covetable book which successfully told the story of Edwina Dunn (Founder of the Tesco Clubcard) and her husband Clive Humby’s purchase of The Old Rectory at Doynton and their project to restore the gardens to their former glory. The book had to include snapshots (amateur photographs) of the process undertaken, professional photography of the final finished garden, profiles of all the people involved in the project from start to finish and an illustrated map of the garden.
The story details how the family, house and business grew together and the development of the gardens from a slightly crumbling setting form some beautiful old blooms to an old rectory walled garden. A heartfelt story of restoring a former open garden to its original beauty and a very personal story which required a personal design complete with personal touches.
A decision was taken to use 1930’s Wills’ cigarette cards depicting wild flowers and roses. These cards linked to the theme of gardening and brought the appeal of using ephemera in the design of the book. A professional photographer was commissioned to take photographs of all the different aspects of the garden. To add further quality to the book we then purchased a number of stock photographs from esteemed photographer Tessa Traeger’s photographic library in order to create dividers within the book and inject more colour. I personally had a lot of input in this project, from the choice of font: Sabon, to the measure of type. I then moved onto the layout, matching each cigarette card with a photograph which complemented it in colour. The captions at the foot of the page were taken from the back of the cigarette cards and hand-typed into the footnotes. I considered every detail, even down to the small leaves accompanying the page numbers. In addition to the book, the cigarette cards were used to create greetings cards to be sold on the day of the garden opening. Small canvas bags were also printed with a silhouette of the flower used on the front cover of the book to protect the books once they were purchased. The Old Rectory Gardens at Doynton won runner-up at the British Book Design and Production Awards 2013.