Find Out Who You Are and Do It On Purpose: What Dolly Parton Taught Me About Landscape Architecture
Poured By: Kayla Copeland, PLA
A LATTE tribute to Dolly Parton (1946–2026)
I found out Dolly Parton passed away somewhere between picking out paver samples and reheating the same cup of coffee for the third time, and I’m not ashamed to say I got a little misty over a materials palette. Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about the Queen of Country: she was, low‑key, one of the best “placemakers” to never to hold a license.
Her whole philosophy could double as a design manifesto. She put it best herself: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” I’ve spent years explaining that exact idea to clients using site diagrams and a lot of hand gestures, and Dolly explained it better with a two‑room cabin replica and a firefly‑print hallway carpet. So, today’s LATTE is part tribute, part design lesson, because it turns out the woman who taught us to work 9 to 5 also taught us how a place finds its own purpose and builds itself around it, unapologetically.
The Problem: Places That Forget What They Are
Here’s a design problem I run into constantly, and I’d bet you’ve felt it too, even if you’ve never once thought about grading plans: you pull into a shopping center, a park, a hotel lobby, and it feels like it could be anywhere. Nothing about it tells you where you are. It’s the built‑environment equivalent of small talk… pleasant, forgettable, gone the second you leave. It is not memorable or capturing a dedicated spot in your brain.
That’s the opposite of what Dolly Parton built, over and over, for fifty years. Whether it was a 150‑acre theme park, a mountain lodge, or (I still can’t believe this is real) a gas station, she refused to let a place be generic. She knew exactly who she was, where she came from, and who her project was for, and she designed accordingly, every single time.
Site Selection Is a Love Letter, Not a Convenience
Before Dollywood was Dollywood, it was Silver Dollar City, a modest park near Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Dolly didn’t pick that spot because it was the easiest real estate deal on the table. She picked it because Pigeon Forge had, in her words, “progressive city government, community involvement and a cooperative spirit” (Knox News) and because it was practically in her own backyard, six miles from the two‑room Locust Ridge cabin where she grew up.
In my world, we call that site analysis and stakeholder engagement. In Dolly’s world, it was just common sense: you build where the land and the people already want the same thing you do. Good sites don’t just get chosen, they choose you back, and Dolly listened when hers did.
Real Craft Beats Manufactured Nostalgia
Walk through Dollywood’s Craftsman’s Valley and you’ll find actual blacksmiths, actual basket weavers, actual glassblowers, real Appalachian trades practiced in public view, not roped off behind glass like a museum diorama. The replica of her childhood cabin was built by her own brother and furnished by her own mother, right down to the family keepsakes. That’s not an Applebee’s cosplaying as a barn. That’s the real thing, placed where people can actually experience it. Real memories and details woven into every step.
This is the exact line I try to hold with clients: vernacular design, pulling from the materials, forms, and stories that are actually native to a place, will always outlast whatever’s trending on a mood board this year. Dolly knew that a mountain theme is easy to fake and painfully obvious when it is. So she didn’t fake it. She hired her actual neighbors!
Design That Listens to the Land
When Dollywood’s HeartSong Lodge opened, Dolly described the aesthetic as “high‑fashion rustic” to the Washington Post, a four‑story stone fireplace built from local rock, still wearing its moss; hallway carpets stitched with the fireflies that lit up her actual childhood summers; murals cycling through all four Smoky Mountain seasons. None of that is decoration for decoration’s sake. Every detail is translating a specific ecology and a specific memory into something you can walk through.
That is, professionally speaking, the whole ballgame. A retention pond can be a chain‑link eyesore, or it can be a design opportunity that reflects the land around it. A streetscape can be interchangeable planters, or it can tell you something true about the neighborhood it sits in. The materials and the story should always come from the site itself.
Yes, Even the Gas Station
And just when I thought Dolly had covered every typology a landscape architect touches, she went and opened a gas station. Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop, off I‑65 in Cornersville, is a 24/7 fuel‑and‑food stop with a mural, a live music stage, EV charging, and (I need you to sit with this) a dog park called Doggy Parton. Her team even took a friendly public jab at Buc‑ee’s on the way out the door according to the New York Post. A gas station, with main‑character energy. Only Dolly.
The lesson scales down beautifully: sense of place isn’t reserved for flagship civic projects with seven‑figure budgets. It applies at every size, from a state park to a rest stop, because the question is always the same: what does this place actually want to be, and whose story does it get to tell? Dolly asked that question at every scale, on purpose, every time.
Three Dolly Moves You Can Actually Steal
Okay, story time is nice, but I promised you a takeaway you could actually use, and I meant it. Here are three real design decisions from Dolly’s properties that translate directly into moves for your own site, project, or next conversation with your landscape architect (hi, hello, that’s me).
1. Plant like you actually live there
When Dollywood built out its Wildwood Grove expansion, the planting design leaned on roughly 80% native plants, sourced through a local nursery specifically to stay “authentic to an East Tennessee mountain environment” (LandscapeArchitect.com). Visitors regularly point out species like oakleaf hydrangea, purple coneflower, and black‑eyed Susans woven through the park. This one is genuinely implementable, and it’s the exact advice I give clients: specify native, climate‑adapted plant palettes instead of generic, big‑box ornamentals. It reinforces regional identity, and it quietly cuts your water bill and maintenance headaches for the next twenty years.
2. Build a hierarchy of gathering spaces, not one big lawn
HeartSong Lodge didn’t bet everything on one giant event lawn. It layered a large communal firepit for group gatherings with a half‑dozen smaller firepits scattered around the property, plus a screened‑in porch for quiet, nightly movie nights. That’s a real site‑planning principle you can ask for by name: design a hierarchy of gathering spaces at different scales, one big communal moment, several small intimate ones, instead of one-size-fits-all seating. People self‑sort into the size of gathering they actually want, and your site feels alive at every hour instead of only during the big event.
3. Let your materials show where they came from
The four‑story stone fireplace anchoring HeartSong’s atrium was built from local rock, and the design team deliberately left some stones with their moss still on rather than scrubbing them to a showroom finish. That’s a specific, quotable decision: let a material show its age and its origin instead of sanitizing it. Next time you’re picking stone, wood, or steel for a project, ask whether it’s allowed to look like it came from somewhere real, or whether it’s been polished into looking like it came from everywhere and nowhere.
The Takeaway
If there’s one thing to carry out of this post, it’s this: great design, at any scale, starts with finding out what a place actually is, (not what’s trendy, not what’s easiest to copy from somewhere else) and then building toward that on purpose. Dolly Parton never needed a design degree to understand that. She just needed to know exactly who she was, and design like she meant it.
That’s the whole job description of a landscape architect, honestly help a place find out who it is, and do it on purpose. If Dolly taught us anything, it’s that a place should feel like it belongs to the people who live there, which happens to be exactly what Copeland Design Collective spends our days figuring out for parks, trails, schools, and civic spaces across Oklahoma, Texas and Oregon. You don’t need a theme‑park budget to build a real sense of place, you just need someone asking the right questions about your site from day one.
Thank you for taking this LATTE break with me — here’s to a woman who found out who she was, did it on purpose, and made every hillside, cabin, and gas station along the way feel like it belonged to somebody. Rest easy, Dolly. And if you’re ready to help your own site find out who it is, Copeland Design Collective would be honored to help you do it on purpose.
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