Landscape is all around us. We take it for granted — it’s just there, the way nature is just there, unless something explicit announces the designer’s hand. The promise of fame drives designers to leave their mark and design loud. If your designer is doing this, you might have a problem.
We will come back to this.
This post was inspired by fashion, when model Bhavitha Mandava walked onto the carpet at this year’s Met Gala wearing what appeared to be a white tank, faded denim, and a sheer zip-up. This was not Met Gala standard by any stretch of the imagination.
Or was it?
Her garments, it turned out, were both everyday and haute couture. What appeared to be denim was silk muslin, processed to mimic it — a trompe l’oeil requiring many hours of work by highly skilled ateliers. A great deal of effort went into making the outfit appear effortless, with just enough hint of high fashion.
It was an image that jarred against the expected spectacle of the Met Gala. Yet there is no denying the power of simplicity in Mandava’s statement. One young woman in something seemingly everyday — but actually not — turned heads and ignited heated debate. Inconspicuous luxury had arrived.
Designing simple is risky. It’s a risk I take often. Most times it pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. Once, I was fired for simple design. The then-CEO of a major development company took extreme exception to a proposal I had put forward for a waterfront project. It was an embarrassing moment. There was nothing offensive in the design — nothing spectacular either, just a sound application of the universal principles of design. Interestingly, a few years later I reconnected with my most energetic critic when his new company hired us for several waterfront projects of their own.
So, if you take my word that good landscape design is by nature unseen, how would you recognise it when you’re looking at it? It’s a fair problem. How do you judge a landscape design? Especially when so much of what gets presented is spectacle — the render, the bombastic gesture, the thing that photographs well on opening day.
Ninety percent of creating a great place is unglamorous: drainage, soil, plants. Done well, none of it calls attention to itself. The difference between a place that genuinely inspires and one that doesn’t — yet wins a Landzine award — is found not only in those quiet decisions but in the intent of the designer.
Ask your designer not what the space will look like, but what it will feel like — at 8am on a Tuesday, years from now when the trees have grown. Ask what brings people back, not what stops them in their tracks the first time. Push back on the render and ask about the everyday experience of that place.
Landscape design is the design of experience. What people carry with them afterward isn’t a singular showy feature — it’s something they felt. Simplicity is a powerful way to create that, but it takes confidence from everyone in the room: from the designer to trust the quieter choice, and from the client to back it.
Mandava’s statement landed because it was new — a genuine disruption of the expected. It could not be repeated with the same force. That is the nature of the revolutionary gesture: it belongs to a moment.
Except when it doesn’t.
In landscape design, the everyday is the revolution. Seek out designers for whom purposeful, unglamorous work is not a statement but a standard. You’ll find them by looking carefully at their past work, listening to how they talk about it, and if possible, over coffee.
The Met Gala moments exist — the civic landmark, the signature public space — and they matter. But they are the exception. For the most part the brief requires quieter work: places where people walk to work, where children play, where someone sits for ten minutes and feels, without knowing why, that the world is in reasonable order. Find designers who do that well, consistently, without fanfare — and together you build something no single gesture can match: a revolution of enduring good places.