The man behind the garden
Made Wijaya
Tennis coach, columnist, Balinese by adoption, and the designer of more than six hundred gardens.
The man behind the garden
Tennis coach, columnist, Balinese by adoption, and the designer of more than six hundred gardens.
Made Wijaya (1953–2016) was an Australian-born landscape designer who lived in Bali and became one of the best-known names in tropical garden design. Born Michael White in Sydney, he created at least six hundred gardens around the world, from the Bali Hyatt in Sanur to David Bowie's garden on Mustique and the Naples Botanical Garden in Florida. In Kerala he designed Indian Summer House, both the buildings and the grounds, and the garden there carries his name.
Sydney to Bali
In 1973 a young Sydney architecture student took a break from his course and sailed to Bali. When the boat struggled to land in heavy seas, he jumped overboard and swam to shore. The break became a life.
A Brahmin family took him in as a son. He learned to speak Balinese, studied the island's rituals with its royal households, and in 1975 a priest renamed him Made Wijaya in a temple ceremony. A former New South Wales junior tennis champion, he first earned his keep teaching tennis and English to wealthy Balinese, and wrote a sharp-tongued column, Stranger in Paradise, for the Sunday Bali Post.
The work
Design pulled him back. His first major commission, in the early 1980s, was the garden of the Bali Hyatt in Sanur, followed by the Oberoi in Seminyak. He treated a garden as theatre, leading the eye from one carved figure to the next through bright shrubs and creepers.
In the late 1980s David Bowie hired him to turn the dry grounds of his house on Mustique, in the Caribbean, into a tropical garden of large ponds and Balinese-style planting. A later owner tore most of it out. Francis Ford Coppola was another client, and Wijaya joked that he was one of few designers to have had a garden blown up, at the Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004.
His gardens reach from Florida, where he worked on the Naples Botanical Garden, to Mexico, Spain, Morocco, Belize, Southeast Asia and Australia. In India his projects included the fish-shaped lawns at the Taj Wellington Mews in Mumbai, and he liked to say some of his best clients were Indian.
The style
Wijaya hated sameness. He mocked resort gardens that copied one another and the stone Buddhas left meditating in every pond, which he likened to “inflated stone cushions”. His own gardens were bright and theatrical, thick with planting and carved figures.
Asked by Man's World magazine in 2005, he called himself “just a garden artist, a retired dancer, a writer, a photographer and an architect.” The writer published six books, among them Tropical Garden Design (1999), At Home in Bali (2000), Modern Tropical Garden Design (2007) and Architecture of Bali (2011).
His house in Kerala
In 2008 Don van de Pol wrote to Wijaya out of the blue after seeing his work in Architectural Digest. Wijaya replied that he would love to help, and that he was in Kerala every second month, working on a house near Trivandrum and a hotel near Fort Bekal.
His firm, P.T. Wijaya Tribwana International, laid out the estate as a cluster of Kerala-style pavilions joined by covered walkways, set in a dense garden of coconut, pepper, fruit and shade trees. The house opened to guests in 2016, the year he died in Sydney on 28 August, aged 63. The garden around the pool is named for him.
How the house came to beQuestions
An Australian-born landscape designer, born Michael White in Sydney in 1953, who settled in Bali in 1973 and designed at least six hundred gardens worldwide. He died in Sydney in August 2016.
Yes. In the late 1980s he transformed the garden of Bowie's house on Mustique into a tropical garden with large ponds and Balinese-style planting.
Indian Summer House in Muvattupuzha, Kerala, was designed by Wijaya, house and garden, and guests can stay there. Its garden is named after him.
A Balinese Brahmin family adopted him, and in 1975 a priest gave him the name Made Wijaya in a temple ceremony.
Six in all, including Tropical Garden Design (1999), At Home in Bali (2000), Modern Tropical Garden Design (2007) and Architecture of Bali (2011).
Sources
Anne Barker's obituary, with the Bowie and Coppola stories.ABC News, 30 Aug 2016 · read →
Geeta Doctor on his work in India and his war on conformity.The Hindu, 17 Sept 2016 · read →
Dates, names and the main works.Wikipedia · read →
The owners' account of working with him, from the first email.PDF · download →