Cherokee Ranch Renovations

StudioCPG provided landscape architectural services for site renovation at Cherokee Ranch near Sedalia. The Master Planning process begins with a step back, viewing the site as a whole and using that perspective to develop a program that identifies opportunities and integrates a response to those opportunities into a singular vision: A reason to act.

The site is rich in both natural resources and history. As a landscape, Cherokee Ranch is at the interface of several distinct ecosystems. These include the Plains Grassland directly connected to a Lowland Riparian Ecosystem. Then, climbing in altitude, there are Shrublands, Juniper Woodlands and Ponderosa Pine Forests AND distant views to Alpine ecosystems.

At 3,400 acres it is large enough that the component natural resource pieces are healthy and sustainable while the geology, the island like landform of the high ground, promotes a sense of being in a distinct and discrete whole. It is a place separate from the world at large. It is the kind of place where one might easily conceive of as a kingdom.

A working, ranch landscape at the lower elevations connects the “kingdom” to the larger world and the realities of life while the Castle, isolated in the sky, connects the kingdom to a more aspirational sensibility associated with sublime views to the high mountains as well as constructing castles.

Like the natural resources of the site the historic, human uses are compact but complete. The trick of the master plan is to re-imagine the Ranch as a place where people can come to experience the best of both worlds — to enjoy the working landscape and the more aspirational castle and grounds and to do it in a way that maintains a close connection with nature.