Villa at Nandihills
Bangalore, India | 2021
Located at the foot of the Nandi Hills this private garden is part of a gated community at the outskirts of Bangalore.
We were approached with a very short brief – to create an aesthetically pleasing and lively garden. It is a weekend home used by the nuclear family as well as for the occasional large extended family gathering.
To accommodate the large number of people we kept extensive areas of lawn on both the front and the back of the villa. We designed a layered tropical planting that runs along all sides of the property and encloses the lawn and the building. It gives privacy and a feeling of protection while not making it feel cramped or crowded.
The width of the planting space was kept under 1m wide but by doing a layered planting we could maximise its use. Taller plants were used in places that needed screening from the road and the neighbors and shorter plants where the view was valuable. For example we used tall palms and bamboo to screen the private pool and dining area from view from the neighboring villas, but kept the plants low where the property shared an edge with the golf course to make most of the expansive borrowed view. Flowering herbs, urns and a birdbath were used to add interest and give character to each corner.
The entrance had an existing plant bed that was attached to the house but cut off from the rest of the garden space. We decided to use this and add interest by creating a very different style of planting here. A dry landscape garden with gravel mulch set against the rock finish of the house was designed for this spot. Locally sourced stone from the neighboring quarry was used to mulch, connecting the garden to the rocky natural landscape that the property is located in.
There was also a narrow space that was in between two walls of the house that was visible from within. Here we did a minimalistic Japanese inspired dry landscape garden. One single variegated Benjamin Ficus tree on an island of Ophiopogon set in a sea of gravel.
