West Carclaze Garden Village

The Story

How do you sell a feeling for somewhere that hasn’t been built?

That was the brief when West Carclaze Garden Village first came to us through design agency Garcia & Partners, who were building the brand from the ground up. A new lakeside community in Cornwall’s clay country, just outside St Austell. Ambitious plans. A developer with genuine vision. But no houses, no streets, no residents. Just landscape, potential, and a tagline: “Life Feels Good.”

Garcia handled the brand identity, the scripts, and all the graphic design for the development. Our job was to add the visual layer and make people believe it.

We started with what was already there: Cornwall itself. The light, the coastline, the pace of life, the food, the makers, the sense of place that draws people to this part of the world. Rather than waiting for bricks and mortar, we built the brand’s visual identity around the life that would eventually fill it.

Two distinct content strands, both rooted in the same idea: that this corner of Cornwall already had everything you’d want from a place to call home.

The Lifestyle Films

Garcia & Partners wrote the scripts for the “Life Feels Good” film series, and they were beautiful: poetic, rhythmic, deeply Cornish. Our job was to bring those words to life on screen, and the collaboration clicked from the start.

“The Spirit of Cornwall” opened with dawn light on the water and wove through the makers, bakers, and fishermen who define this part of the world. “Living In The Landscape” was quieter, more personal: morning runs, wildflowers, family picnics in spaces that felt untouched. “A Better Way To Live” pulled it all together, asking what your life could look like if you chose a place like this.

The films weren’t property tours. There were no houses to tour. Instead, they were an invitation to imagine a different kind of life, grounded in a real place with a real identity. We brought in a model family, a stylist, a photographer, and spent two sun-soaked summer days filming across the clay country landscape. The result was content that sold an idea rather than a product, and it worked.

Clay Country Kitchen

The lifestyle films captured how it felt to be here. The recipe series grounded that in something more tangible.

Clay Country Kitchen was a seasonal recipe series we produced with chef and food writer James Strawbridge, developed in collaboration with Garcia & Partners and filmed in and around the West Carclaze landscape. Each episode centred on local, seasonal Cornish ingredients: Bramley apples from garden trees, mussels from the coast, mackerel caught that morning, strawberries slow-grown in Cornish sunshine.

We shot across all seasons, building a collection of films that felt as much about place as they did about food. James cooked outdoors wherever possible, surrounded by woodpiles, stone walls, and the kind of light you only get in this part of the world. The production values were high but the feel was relaxed and personal. Proper food, cooked properly, in a setting that made sense.

The series lived across the village’s social channels and website, but the story didn’t stop there. The recipes were eventually compiled into a physical cookbook, printed and given to residents as a welcome gift when they moved into their home. Content that started as marketing became something people kept on their kitchen shelf. That’s the kind of lifecycle we love to see.

The Bigger Picture

We also filmed a longer piece with Dorian Beresford, a developer behind West Carclaze, and local creator Hayley Sherwood-Pope. It was a walk-and-talk through the landscape, exploring his vision for the lakes, the community spaces, the clay country collective, and why building a 21st-century Cornish village meant caring about far more than just the houses.

It’s a different kind of film to the lifestyle series. Less poetic, more conversational. But it captures something important: the ambition behind the project and the genuine passion driving it. For us, understanding that vision was what made all the other content feel authentic rather than hollow.

What This Project Shows

West Carclaze is a good example of how content can do more than promote. The lifestyle films created desire for a place that didn’t physically exist. The recipe series built a sense of local identity and community. And the cookbook gave new residents something tangible that connected them to the landscape and culture around their new home.

From brand launch to community building, from social content to a printed book on the kitchen counter. One client, multiple content strands, all working together. That’s the kind of thinking we bring to every project.