Posted by David Hamilton on July 8th, 2009

One of the last “finishing touch” items has just been accomplished on Bundoran Farm’s first three country roads as we’ve installed signage.

These signs, like many of the other legal and functional requirements of modern community development, present an interesting design challenge. How do you make a sign that’s VDOT-compliant, obvious and helpful for wayfinding and safety, durable and low-maintenance, while maintaining the character of this place. How do you place something emblematic of automobile-driven modernity in a design context where every move has been about keeping this place from ever looking like a “subdivision”?

Behind the scenes, our team assembled images of signage, entries and boundaries of over 150 farms in Central Virginia. We knew from the design of our roads that, well, farms have roads, and some have signs, so somebody must have figured this out. We reviewed the images as a team, and decided on four or five precedents, all within a few miles of Bundoran Farm, which we thought successfully melded function and aesthetic form. We then set about designing and fabricating signs and posts that, with minor tweaks of material and detail, follow these successful historic precedents.

The freshly-installed signs sit on detailed 6″ posts inspired by a farm entry down Plank Road, and the signs themselves, though made of precision-milled modern and reflective materials to satisfy VDOT’s all-weather visibility criteria, are framed and installed to reinforce the idea that this is no ordinary road.

If you haven’t been out to Bundoran Farm in a few weeks, I encourage you to take a (15 mile-per-hour)drive around the property, to see what the finished product of “Preservation Development” looks like.

But please, don’t drive like me.

Filed under: General, Project Updates