Keith Horner
Partner
With over 40 years experience of working in private practice, Keith has completed a significant body of landscape work for both public and private sector clients, as well as developing an unusually broad base of experience from working with other professionals and specialists. Keith is committed to realising creative designs, tempered by practicality, and is particularly noted for conceptual and strategic landscape design and high quality landscape detailing.
Throughout his professional career, Keith’s design approach has remained constant: start each project totally fresh; question everything from first principles; apply a rational decision making process; avoid preconceived ideas. He is often as surprised by the final design solution as the Client. His pursuit of quality is implicit at all stages of a project, firmly founded on pragmatic yet creative design responses, restrained by a healthy sense of humour. A range of design awards confirms the merits of his approach. Keith continues to absorb historical and contemporary landscape design influences which allow the full potential of a project to be achieved.
Keith has a strong interest in the relationship of buildings to the landscape and in particular in contemporary Scottish and Norwegian architectural design within rural and mountainous landscapes, where the response to the specific circumstances of climate, orientation and place create distinctive architectural forms and identities. The history of modernist residential design in the UK, Scandinavia and North America is also a specific interest, where the belief in the designers of the role of sunlight, fresh air, shelter and views of nature as pre-requisites for a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle are admired characteristics. Keith also has a keen interest in, and collection of, Scandanavian furniture.
Keith is an accomplished Scottish winter mountaineer and alpinist, who has climbed extensively throughout Scotland, the Alps, the Canadian Rockies and Norway. His well publicised ‘flight’ into Coire Cas in the Cairngorms demonstrates only too clearly the utter folly of allowing Yorkshiremen unlimited access to the Scottish hills in winter.