Tupelo Bend’s Grand Opening

This week we stopped by the grand opening of Tupelo Bend, a low-impact development commercial office park that we planned and designed in collaboration with our good friend Dave Merrifield of Holden Design Shop. Owners and developers New Leaf Builders imagined the office park to be more like a neighborhood, with four buildings resembling homes instead offices. 

The undeveloped site was typical of the natural Lowcountry landscape, with numerous grand trees and a freshwater wetland. These natural features served as our design inspiration for the office park, and the site plan was developed to work with the existing landscape and natural resources. The office park was named “Tupelo Bend” in honor of the native tupelo trees within the wetland and the entrance road that was designed to bend around the existing trees and wetlands.

Following the original drainage patterns of the landscape, we designed a series of inter-connected bio-retention basins. This distributed stormwater management system creates a functional landscape of shallow depressions, swales, and vast areas of native vegetation that store, treat, and use stormwater runoff. A beautifully-crafted pedestrian bridge crosses the central bio-retention basin, creating a unique, serene arrival experience to the offices of New Leaf Builders and their neighbors.