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Q1 Please tell us your brief profile and working career. Why did you become garden designer?
We are a landscape and garden design practice based in London. We design contemporary modern landscapes and gardens mostly in the United Kingdom but also around the world. I become a garden designer because of a love of design, architecture, art and most of all a love of nature and plants.
Q2 What is the concept of your design?
If there is any underlying concept to our design philosophy I guess it can be summed up in the word 'balance'. We try to create spaces of simplicity, elegance and above all balance. Balance between harmony and contrast. Balance between aesthetics and function. Balance between hard and soft. Balance between art and architecture. |
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Q3 Could you tell us about your latest trade shows or projects that you are working on right now?
We have just completed a show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show and are working on another for next year. We are also working on an exhibition garden for the Gothenburg Festival in Sweden in 2008. We have also recently been approached to submit a design for a garden/installation in Canada. Exhibition gardens are a lot of work but so important to the development of our design ideas and our business. They are very challenging but also incredibly rewarding.
Q4 What is your greatest inspiration?
Art in the form of painting or sculpture or architecture is a bottomless well of inspiration. I don't pay much attention to the boundaries that may or may not exist between art, design, architecture and landscape. Design is the thread that ties all these disciplines together. |
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Q10 Are there any places or countries you would like to visit?
Top of my list at the moment would be Japan. So much of my design work stems from Modernist ideas and principles and of course so much of the Modernist aesthetic was influenced by Japanese architecture and design principles. For me Japan is the leading nation in the world in design and architecture. Japan's influence is so great. |
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Q11 When is the most important time of your day?
First thing in the morning in the silence before my children wake.
Q12 Are there any people who inspired you? Who do you respect?
The great craftsmen we work with every day inspire me. Carpenters, stone masons etc. I respect their skill, their patience and their knowledge and love of the materials they work with.
Q13 Do you have any advice for the young people?
1. Don't be an accountant!
2. Create a garden.
Q14 What do you want to achieve in your career? What is your goal?
To work all over the world, to learn from different people, different settings, different landscapes. To harness nature and design to create beautiful spaces. |
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Philip Nixon Design is a Landscape and Garden Design Practice with a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach combining garden and landscape design with architecture and furniture design. Each project is unique and we aim to create integrated, unified spaces which are aesthetically and functionally right for the site and fulfil the brief set by our clients. They work on a wide range of projects both small and large, urban and country, domestic and international.
They believe excellence in design is the thread that ties together landscape, ecology, architecture and art. They seek to constantly explore the relationship between inside and out, between art and design and between the natural and the created landscape. They employ a light touch and a keen attention to detail to create gardens and landscapes that have an elegant simplicity. Thier planting style is natural and relaxed but with a structure and geometry that combine to achieve balanced and naturally harmonious gardens.
Philip studied on the MA Garden Design Course at the world-renowned Inchbald School of Design. He graduated top of his class. He is a Trustee of The Landscape Design Trust and is on the editorial advisory panel of the Garden Design Journal. |
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Q5 What do you feel important when you are working on your design?
It may seem obvious but the most important thing is to design so that we meet the brief set by the client but at the same time to try and surprise and delight them with the result.
Q6 Which type of project has given you the most satisfaction?
They all do! I don't take on projects unless there is an interesting challenge that will allow us to experiment, learn and develop as designers.
Q7 How has British design influenced your work?
Some would say modernism bypassed Britain but if you look at the work of, for example, the post war modernist constructivist artists/sculptors such as Victor Pasmore, Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Bernard Meadows etc you can see a complex and fascinating body of work. |
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Q8 What would you be if you weren't a garden designer?
A boat builder or a sculptor or a furniture maker or...... There are so many things I would like to be but they all involve building in one form or another.
Q9 Who is your dream collaborator?
Tadao Ando. He has a real appreciation for landscape as well being a great architect. His buildings become part of the landscape and are not separate from it. |
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