It begins with a conversation about your property and what you’d like the map to capture. Anthony will discuss scope, likely site visit requirements, and a rough timeline. Most decorative commissions take between four and nine months from first discussion to delivered print.

Yes — for almost all decorative commissions. The site visit is where most of the real work happens: walking boundaries, talking to the people who know the land, finding what the data providers don’t know. For larger properties this may mean multiple visits across more than one season.

The survey work is largely Anthony’s own. What he asks of you is your knowledge: time walking the land together, access to records and memories, and the chance to talk to the people — keepers, managers, farm hands — who know the property best. Either way, the land gives up its secrets.

Most clients don’t. There are two options. The first is to commission now and update later — around a fifth of the studio’s annual work is returning to maps already made, adding new woodland, new buildings and new illustrations as the property evolves. The second is to map the finished vision rather than the current state. At a Wiltshire estate, an extensive parkland design still under construction was mapped complete — giving the client a permanent record of what the estate will become. Being mid-project is never a reason to wait.

Yes — for commissions involving significant historical depth. The condensed history of the property, divided by era, is typeset and embedded within the framed print as a formal written panel. The history does not exist separately from the map. It is part of the object.