working on a garden design of a newly built villa in a shanghai suburb, we learnt something about another suspiciously over-used word these days, other than “eco” and “art”.

for the villa garden, the man wants a more abstract open feeling like a classical french garden, the woman wants an intimate english cottage style. so we propose a marriage of the two: abstract flat lawns surrounded by dense intimate planting. 

when realised, this instant garden, designed like much “design” these days, in which every major city is overflowing with “design”, where every urban man and woman consume more and more “design”, and in which having more “design” does not mean that designers will make more interesting works; this garden designed and to be made in chinese speed, will be very different from this tropical garden in kuching below, which took the owner more than 30 long years to cultivate.

(garden designed by h.b. yap, as sketched by km)