WEST HORSLEY PLACE
Where the past is always present.
Background
West Horsley Place is a glorious Grade I listed manor house on a 400 acre estate in Surrey, and home to the Grange Park Opera House. The current house dates from 1425, and has a long and colourful history — Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Guy Fawkes have all walked the corridors.
Its cinematic landscapes, historic rooms and authentic character have become a favourite location for period films and television, and it’s probably best known as the fictional Button House, in the delightful BBC comedy, Ghosts.
With its rich and colourful history, West Horsley Place has a wealth of secrets to share. It's a place to wander and wonder, to discover something old or learn something new.
THE BRIEF
The West Horsley Place Trust has a clear mission — to deepen connections with heritage and nature, and create a space where creativity and well-being can flourish. Having completed the most urgent renovations to the house, they are moving into an exciting new phase of realising this vision. I was approached by the team managing a full rebrand, and asked to write the copy for their new website.
Tone of voice
I began by reviewing the brand work that had been completed to date, and creating a tone of voice profile to sit within the brand guidelines. This step ensures I have captured the brand personality before I start writing copy; especially important when I have come into a brand project that is already underway.
The tone of voice I developed is warm and welcoming, helping every visitor to feel at home. It’s also richly textured, using sensory, characterful language to spark curiosity and imagination. Finally, it’s purposeful — confident and clear about the charity’s mission and responsibilities.
Our beautiful estate is made up of arable fields, orchards, hedgerows and ancient woodland. In summer our sunflower field is a symphony of humming bees.
WEBSITE CONTENT PLANNING
My next step was to audit the existing website content. Although most of the copy was still useful and valid, the site had grown quickly and organically over the last few years and begun to ramble, making it hard for visitors to navigate, and for team members to know where to add new content.
I devised a new sitemap, simplifying navigation and categories, and future-proofing the site for new content. I then wire-framed over 50 website pages, planning the content for each page and including links between pages to ensure the site flowed in a logical way. I also created new data conventions for events and articles, to make listing and filtering easier.
When I presented this document to the client, they were delighted. This job can be one of the biggest headaches for clients, as designers or developers don’t usually work with content at this level of detail, and clients don’t have the time to do it thoroughly. In my experience, poor content planning is often the culprit when website projects go off the rails.
WEBSITE COPYWRITING
Once the plan was in place, it was relatively straightforward to edit and write the copy. I was able to repurpose most of the existing content, making edits to bring it in line with the new tone of voice, cleaning up duplication, and creating consistency between menus, headings and links for clarity and accessibility.
In total, I submitted over 13,000 words for this website. Projects like this one require a lot of analytical thinking, organising and connecting ideas, all things that I love doing. And of course writing about an historic house and garden of this calibre is a dream come true for me.
Our historic estate is a space for everyone — where the past is living, nature flourishes, and creativity thrives.
“A huge thank you for your help with the West Horsley Place website. Your strategic insight, as well as amazing copywriting, was invaluable. We hope that we get to work with you again.”