Landscape Project: a Private Property in Leningrad Region
The client came to us with ideas he obtained from historical movies and literally quoting one of them. He wanted to create a traditional Japanese garden on a 0.5 hectare plot in the Leningrad region with an old pine forest next to it. Tasks that had to be solved in the landscaping project: preserve all the pine trees on the site, ensure maximum privacy of the property from neighbours and build a few additional structures without exposing them.
Japanese landscape design bureau created a kaiyū-shiki-teien, a promenade garden with a path going around a pond. A white pebble path runs across the garden, passing through a small rocky beach and the hunter’s hut, a small traditional Japanese-style pavilion for tea ceremonies and relaxation. There is also a rotenburo, an open-air hot bath, typical for onsens, Japanese hot springs. It overlooks a small island and graceful bridges leading to it. The pond has three sections of different depth, one section is 2 metres deep, so you can enter the pool directly from the terrace of the main house. The excavated soil was distributed throughout the site to create Japanese-style terrain with vertical drops. A winding path is another distinctive feature of Japanese gardens, with every turn you make, a new view opens up.
A spa with a sauna and a gym is located underground and covered with vegetation on top. One of the walls in the lounge room is made of glass and faces the pond, so that you can see both the surface of the pond and what is underwater at the same time. The vertical drops of the terrain also hide a 5-car parking.
Eventually, the property turned out to be highly saturated both aesthetically and functionally, nothing looked alien. And once again we were convinced that Japanese approach to landscape design is so versatile, it can be used for very contemporary objects as well.