Birch Grove is a three-home development sitting inside an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, listed with Sotheby's. The difficulty with a property like this is that its greatest asset doesn't photograph. A still can show you the acreage and the architecture, but it can't tell you how far the green actually runs, or how completely the place stands on its own out there. So I filmed the location as part of the property rather than the backdrop to it. The houses hold their own — a clean, deliberate design, each one with its own presence — but what someone is really buying at Birch Grove is the seclusion, and the life that becomes possible because of it. The film had to carry both at full scale: the homes, and the country they sit in.
Three homes secluded in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
The agent presents it on camera, and presents it with the class a property at this level demands. A buyer here is choosing who they deal with as carefully as they're choosing the house, and the film needed to make Sotheby's the obvious answer to both. When this came out, there was nothing else like it in the UK. Nobody in the industry was making property films at this level. It landed as one of the first of its kind — and the emulation, from brands and from individual filmmakers, followed it. This is where The Cinematic Experience started.
