When the Woollahra Walled Garden landed in the studio, the most important design decision had already been made. Three sandstone walls were still there, hidden under render. The job of the designer was mostly to get out of their way.
On Garden Design
This is the discipline of heritage work, and it cuts against most of what a designer is trained to do. The instinct is to put something on the page. The right answer, often, is to put nothing — to remove rather than add. We approach heritage commissions with three questions, asked in order. First: what is original and still functioning? Second: what is original and recoverable? Third: what has been lost, and is a contemporary intervention more honest than a replica?
“Working on heritage-listed sites teaches a particular discipline: most of the design work is subtraction, not addition. A note on how we approach restoration commissions.”
Replica work is the wrong answer more often than people expect. A cast iron fountain made in 2024 to look like one made in 1903 carries a small lie. A clearly contemporary fountain, made well, in conversation with the original walls, carries the truth — that we are caring for the garden in our own time, and we know what year it is.
The garden ends up reading as a continuous conversation between then and now. That is, we think, what restoration is for.
