Atmospheric and Experiential – Florian Wild
Led by landscape designer Rupert Baynes-Williams, Florian Wild was founded on a nostalgic reverence for landscape. The practice’s approach extends beyond a physical study of the local context to embrace historic narratives and new interpretations of place.
“I think having a garden is a luxury,” reflects Rupert. “I often return to ideas of landscape as a folly for pleasure and a representation of the owner’s character.” Starting his career in production horticulture, Rupert found delight in fusing science and creativity to grow trees for a specific purpose – and with both parents in design and construction, entering the design industry was a natural progression. After honing his skills at some of Melbourne’s leading landscape design practices, Rupert established Florian Wild as “a vehicle to explore garden-making separate from myself and what I like doing elsewhere.”
Rupert has since cultivated a small team to increase the practice’s capacity whilst maintaining a personalised client experience. “We want to keep our hands dirty and get to know our clients on a fundamental level,” he says. Such relationships allow Florian Wild to build trust, push the boundaries of the brief and pursue inventive, unexpected outcomes. “Prescriptive briefs can be a constraint for creativity,” reflects Rupert. “The best outcomes are those born from a straightforward relationship, where we can open up the dialogue with our clients early – to trust us but be challenged by us.”
Florian Wild’s concepts are driven by intuition. An initial visit to site is telling, with Rupert and his team deriving a feeling or atmosphere almost instinctively. “We hold on to those first impressions to ensure our designs are not over-worked,” says Rupert. A visual language and layout are developed to establish a conceptual direction, often drawing on precedents from sources beyond landscape design – lines from books, poems and songs or evocative imagery from films and theatre. “It doesn’t need to be too cerebral,” he concedes. “It’s just a way of articulating how we want our clients to feel.”
Tackling the landscape design of a striking midcentury home in Toorak, designed by esteemed Holgar and Holgar Architects, Florian Wild imagined the lavish parties hosted by previous owners, driving a playful approach to the garden design. For another home in Caulfield, “there was an ongoing joke that one of the clients might be a spy,” laughs Rupert. “We peppered some debonair photos of Sean Connery as James Bond into our presentation – there’s always those slight conceptual elements coming through.”
These creative threads are often shared with a broader team of collaborators, namely architects and interior designers working on the project concurrently. “The design process is becoming much more integrated, with each contributors’ work informing the other,” observes Rupert. Such was the case for Federal House, where Florian Wild collaborated with architects Edition Office to develop a dramatic site-specific response inspired by the client’s love of the natural hinterland topography. “The planting scheme drew on a singular species. Instead of the planting drawing visual dominance, the design considered how the plants rushed down the hill and mounded,” he says, reflecting on the natural landscape and Edition Office’s recessive yet textural architecture.
Florian Wild’s debut project, a courtyard designed for singer and actor Troye Sivan, further expresses the studio’s intuitive approach. Designed in collaboration with Flack Studio, the planting palette and material specifications craft a layered, rambling and collected sensibility, allowing the composition to evolve as an ever-changing artwork. “We always want our clients to feel like we were never there, for the spaces to feel rough around the edges or a little naïve, for clients to take ownership and feel the space is theirs,” Rupert reflects.
Currently working on a 10-acre property combining hospitality and accommodation in the Gold Coast hinterland, Florian Wild continues to embrace an emotive and artistic methodology. “We’re planning to plant out a field of agave,” reveals Rupert. Working closely with the site’s owner and operator, some of Florian Wild’s landscape concepts are beginning to inform the future use of the site, accentuating a porosity between disciplines.
This inherent dialogue, problem solving and connection with clients and other creatives is a source of great fulfilment to Rupert. “I enjoy the intellectual part of what we do. It’s an aesthetic thing but it fuses chemistry, biology, geology and meteorology,” he muses. Balancing these varied principles and considerations across different project types and scales, “finding an appropriate garden design is incredibly rewarding.”
Florian Wild’s work subtly reflects Rupert’s own experiences, his fascination with travel, observations from the everyday and escapism in film. “On one level, gardening is set design, and I’m certainly inspired by the emotion of the places I encounter,” he says. Embracing landscape as an experiential pursuit, Florian Wild’s gardens create mood and spark feeling, serving as instruments of connection with nature.
