This week I get an opportunity to work on a paying client’s property. Jenny picks me up from the office early in the morning and we take a 15 minute drive to a 75 acre property. The drive from the gate to the house is well manicured and designed. There we meet Adam who is the property manager for the owners and the person that Jenny has been working with the most. The owners are a gay couple from Singapore with adopted twins who plan to stay on property a few weeks or months of the year. However, whenever they come they will bring a whole group of staff, family, and friends with them and the design needs to cater to these needs. Before we can get into the design projectary, we need to take soil samples. To take soil samples we must mark out 10-12 spots from all over a certain zone, dig past the top soil, and bag dirt from at least 6 inches down. Then it is all mixed in a clean bucket and a sample is taken in a baggy to be shipped for testing. Jenny and I went through the orchard, the spider infested agave, overgrown cane grass hills, and neglected farm rows to flag and pull out roots for each spot. Adam and Phil then went to each and took the samples.
After this we lounged at the outdoor lanai overlooking a bowl shaped hill, several gulches of invasive trees, and the sparkling blue ocean. Adam showed us plans for extending the already 3,000 square foot home to 18,000 square feet and it quickly became apparent that there was so much potential for clients that didn’t seem to have any kind of budget. Over the rest of this day and the next, Jenny enlisted me to imagine the hill before us as the central convergence for the family to play and adventure outdoors. She had started making plans for a wetland swimming pool near the front of the space, some type of structure to overlook the view from the top of the ridge, and a mandala garden. She also asked me to look into a way to connect these elements through an interactive and playful permaculture experience for both kids and adults. I was inspired to research adventure obstacles and fitness stations for the space that was left. I included maybe 25 ideas for different adventure elements that Jenny put into a slideshow for presenting to the clients. Along with that I researched wetland pools and we found a stargazing pavilion to sit atop the hill. Jenny gave me a printout of the base map and asked me to design the space with the elements we discussed as well as adding pathways so we could dissect each section into a new element. I added a living rock wall as a windbreak for the pavilion and mandala garden, trellises around the other side of the garden, boardwalk and deck around the pool, and a stone pathway through the wetland that Jenny and Adam loved and were sure the client would want to include in the finished design. It was exciting to have some authority over a very probable design and even more exciting to watch Philip include it in the digital design.
The rest of the week Philip and I worked on Jenny’s website, logo, and branding which consisted mostly of playing with web elements and fine tuning business cards.