One to Watch: Daniel Richards

Photo by: Steve Freihon

There is always time to celebrate a new talent in New York — it’s one of the many things that the city does best. In 2008 the buzz was about Daniel Richards, the young Aussie who joined the New York City-based landscape design firm Plant Specialists. Come see what the talk is all about:

GD: What brought you from Sydney to New York?

DR: To become senior designer for New York’s Plant Specialists. At the forefront of green roof design, and one of the oldest and largest firms specializing in Manhattan rooftops, they wanted to expand into the estate side of the business, which was my specialty in Sydney.

GD: You made your New York debut at the Kips Bay Decorator Show House last year. Tell us about that.

DR: Kips Bay has always been very traditional and conservative, but we made a strategic decision to break the mold — particularly because this was the first time it had ever taken an outdoor space seriously. We named our terrace “Traditional With a Twist,” and animated it with sculptural furniture from the Italian manufacturer Porro, bluestone paving, lead-coated copper planters and glass resin pots. Then I surrounded the terrace with box hedging, which I opened at strategic moments to take advantage of the views.

GD: There is the New York/L.A. connection, the New York/Paris connection. For you, it’s the New York/Sydney connection. What projects do you have in the works on the Southern Continent?

DR: Pitching the redesign of the landscape of Iona — one of Sydney’s most historic houses.

GD: What do American landscape designers need to learn from their Australian cousins?

DR: To keep it simple. In spring, New York is plagued by the confetti effect — of mixing too many species. I believe in planting one thing for impact. Design, refine and then repeat — that’s how you get the wow factor.

GD: What do Australians need to learn from us?

DR: Trust professional advice.

GD: How do you spend your time during the long 24-hour flight to Sydney?

DR: I take four sleeping pills, order four gin and tonics, and read as many magazines as possible.

Hotel Gardens Worth Visiting

By the time guests check into Hotel Modera, they’ve already checked out the boutique hotel’s unique courtyard garden. In what used to be the unsightly parking lot of a 1960s motor lodge, Jane Hansen of Lango Hansen Landscape Architects has conjured a chic contemporary oasis in downtown Portland. The focal point is a 64-foot-long, 12-foot-tall living wall planted with drip-irrigated panels of evergreen huckleberry, euonymus, variegated pachysandra, grasses and ferns that were intended as an abstraction of the varied colors and textures of the Pacific Northwest. But make no mistake: This miniature Eden is still an urban garden, as the neat grid of concrete pavers and COR-TEN steel planters filled with Japanese maples attest. A sleek glass-and-steel canopy and slatted meranti fence — designed by Holst Architecture — bisect the courtyard while simultaneously guiding hotel visitors from the street straight into the lobby and differentiating the hotel restaurant from the garden. Guests and neighborhood denizens alike are welcome to drop in and savor the outdoors day or night. They have a choice of several options that seamlessly merge the built world with the landscape: precast concrete benches near the green wall (great for morning coffee), tables on the open-air dining patio (a lunch and dinner favorite) or chairs pulled up to one of three fire troughs aglow with amber-colored glass (a campfire in the city). Several sculptures made out of recycled granite formed into tubular shapes by local artist Michihiro Kosuge serve as a gateway to the year-and-a-half-old garden, promising a tranquil refuge to all who enter. hotelmodera.com

A Conversation with Jane Hansen

Q: What inspired the design?

A: My husband and partner, Kurt Lango, and I had photos of a trip we took up to the Columbia River Gorge and pixelated them to break them up into organic patterns. It was all about evoking the Northwest feel within an urban site with gridded pavers both on the pavement and up on the wall. We borrowed landscape and put it into a new context. The wall is like a sheer cliff of plant material. We tried to get as much color and texture as we could.

Q: What pleases you most about this garden?

A: The real thrill is seeing people in a garden when it’s finished. I love seeing people sitting around the fire at night, relaxing and enjoying being outside in the evening.