Design Ideas and Inspiration

As Sydney landscape designers, we decided to escape the wonderful bustle of the city over the New Year – and we found ourselves at a beautiful retreat in the rainforest hinterland surrounding Byron Bay. We work long and hard as landscape designers, and thanks to the January floods, we were happily marooned for several days at the relaxing...

The battle between architecture and nature has intensified in recent decades and for many there is no reconciling the built environment with the natural landscape. Working with landscape designers to Integrate vertical walls and green rooftops into their buildings aside, architects generally get a bad rap when it comes to being seen as nature...

First impressions really do count. A welcoming, well designed entry to your home sets the tone and mood for what lies beyond. Whether you live in a large suburban house or a small inner city terrace here are five simple garden design tips to make a great first impression at your front door. 1. Make a statement with bold feature pot specimens...

How spectacular! I love Gymea lilies or Doryanthes excelsa, with their majestic tall stems and magnificent large, red flower heads. Gymea lilies are an iconic Australian flower, indigenous to the Sydney Basin, and proudly line Southern Cross Drive along the route from Sydney Airport to the city. Their meaning is derived from two Greek words...

Spring is almost here, you can smell it in the air! There is no other season in the year that heralds such hope and excitement for new beginnings. The sun shines a little brighter, the air starts to warm and gardens start to burst forth with a riot of colour and sensuous perfumes. Ah spring, we love it!Italian gardens are admired the world...

So finally we have arrived at the twenty first century in our look at the history of modern landscape designers. At the beginning of our series I observed that, “Very little happens by chance and the work of contemporary landscape designers is no exception.” So the five twenty first century landscape design projects that I’ve chosen to look at...

In the last blog we looked at Frank Lloyd Wright, a celebrated twentieth century American architect, who also excelled as a landscape designer. Lloyd designed wonderful gardens for some of his most iconic houses. In this blog we look at Isamu Noguchi, another cross disciplinary design master, practicing as a landscape designer. Noguchi was one...

Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses are revered as twentieth century architectural masterpieces but his work as a landscape designer is lesser known. Wright considered the house and its surrounding landscape design one organic whole and as a master landscape designer set out to place his buildings in settings as impressive and beautiful as the houses...

Thomas Church, Garrett Eckbo, Lawrence Halprin and Dan Kiley were leading landscape designers in the modernist period and their pioneering, innovative landscape designs presented new approaches and alternative solutions that have laid the foundations for more recent contemporary landscape designers. The American landscape designer Thomas...