Client: Duchy of Cornwall Nursery
Date: August 2020

With a wide selection of quality plants, an award-winning café, excellent shop, views of the Fowey Valley and Restormel Castle, and even a bumblebee garden, the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery has so much to offer visitors.

The nursery has a huge range of flowers, trees and shrubs for sale, and its talented team are delighted to help customers with gardening tips and advice. The café serves award-winning dishes with a focus on local produce, and the wonderful shop is a showcase for beautiful clothing, distinctive decorative objects and unusual gifts, as well as the quality garden tools that you’d expect.

Website

Drawing together the combined efforts of our design, development and copywriting teams, the latest Duchy of Cornwall Nursery website is the result of extensive UX and combined creative vision.

With the nursery’s target audience uppermost in our minds, we crafted a new website that evokes the distinctive values at the heart of the nursery, bringing a sense of creativity and excitement back into gardening. Showcasing events, news posts, Instagram feeds and downloadable menus, the site is alive with content and energy. On top of this, a new click and collect ‘plant finder’ function makes it easy for online shoppers to research and select what they want, and pay in advance of collection.

User-focused design

The new website was designed and built over a period of several months. During that time, we invited the Duchy team to take part in a series of interactive workshops, through which they were able to get deeply involved with the project. It was great for us to get so much detailed input, while the nursery team enjoyed watching our ideas grow and develop into a beautiful, bespoke website.

Printed communication

Alongside this digital presence, we’ve also applied our deep-rooted understanding of the Duchy brand and design principles to its marketing communications, creating a consistent look and feel.

A poster reading 'Jazz on a summer's eve'.

Houmout

To help promote the nursery to a wider audience, we created a newspaper titled Houmout – the motto of the Duchy of Cornwall. ‘Houmout’ is Latin for ‘high spirited’, which is a sentiment wholly reflected in the publication's content: an engaging blend of articles on horticulture, local walks and the ingredients they use in the nursery café to make their mouth-watering meals.

A stack of the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery's gazette, Houmout, tied with a piece of string.
Copies of Houmout – the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery's gazette – opened on different pages.
A double spread in Houmout, Duchy of Cornwall Nursery's gazette.
An illustration of Cornish choughs.
An illustration of a knife.

Karl Taylor, General Manager, Duchy of Cornwall Nursery

Our relationship with Nixon has been growing for a number of years and from their response to the challenge of creating of our new website it is clear to us why this has been the case. To get under the skin of the changing business, understand its quirks, its renewed vision and the journey so far is far from a simple task but this was achieved with a calmness, style and underlying energy that has been quite striking. When handed over, our new website firmly took us into the next part of the journey with its dynamic content, superior browsing experience and a greater propensity to bring our audience closer to the one or more of the vibrant and growing experiences that the nursery offers. Our website now truly supports and will help realise many exciting possibilities into the future.

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