Men's Zone Magazine, Vol.1, No.4, October 1997

MADE WIJAYA:
One with Nature

Text by K. Karenina

Four Season's Resort Bali's breathtaking landscape is a product of Made Wijaya's 20-year garden-making

Hunched over a clump of wild ferns, preening away the wilted leaves, Made Wijaya is in his element. “I’m a gardener,” he declares nonchalantly. “My greatest pleasure is in seeing something grow from nothing.” In fact, Wijaya is a prized landscape architect given to understatement but driven by a passion for things dramatic, romantic – and grand.
His home, in Sanur, on the Indonesian paradise island of Bal, sits on a secluded swath of greenery – part tropical, part English, part theater. It is his stage, an all-encompassing show place of serenity and splendor, and his crowning glory. “To appreciate a man,s nature,” he philosophizes, “you have to see his garden.”
The house is unapologetically Balinese, from the thatched roof with pointed domes to the carved wooden balustrades and the raft of native touches from floor to ceiling. But Villa Bebek is nothing if not for its signature garden and a somewhat aristocratic air in its labyrinthine, courtyard-style domain. The complex is interspersed with pools and ponds, ornate stone carvings and crazy paving. It is an absorbing play of eclecticism and multiculturalism that define the art and the man.

Made Wijaya, for a start, is Australian. He first set foot on the island in 1973 after jumping ship and swimming ashore in rainstorm. He was Michael White, a red-haired, tall but slight man his 20s, looking to strike out on his own, having taken a year off architecture school. “I left Bali and went to Surabaya. Bali wasn’t bush enough for me.” he recalls. He forsook the island only to return, half knowing Bali had cast a spell on him, “I bought my first Balinese drag, joined a procession and went with it to nearly Turtle Islands.”
“Education by submersion” is how he describes his encounter with Balinese culture in the embrace of a foster home with a Brahmin family. Learning to respect the work ethic in the Hindu concept of divine duty, he would find himself assimilated into the local culture. Characteristically rapid and purposeful, he settled into the relaxed, unhurried pace of his new home, began moving in synch with its gentle rhythm, and adopted a new name. “I think I was born speaking Balinese,” he says of his fluency in the native tongue.
What followed was a string of occupations: Balinese dancer, tennis coach, architect, lecturer, tourist, guide and journalist, hammering out the snappy newspaper column “A Stranger in Paradise,” the ruminations of a self-styled “Baliphile” most long time Bali residents love to hate. In the latter guise, he also wrote the “Encyclopedia of Balinese Architecture” and contributed to several guidebooks about the region.

When he was asked to design a private garden in the fashionable Batujimbar complex, Wijaya had found his calling. But his big break did not come until 1979, when the renowned architect Peter Muller commissioned him to revamp the gardens of the legendary Bali Oberoi, Asia’s first boutique villa hotel. The transformation spoke for itself: an alluring landscape packed by secret nooks and crannies emerged from the deliberate contrast of natural and man-made elements. The Oberoi took on a cooler, more carefree atmosphere and a whole new face.

Then came Bali Hyatt, which he transformed into a masterpiece of ordered naturalness, and scores of commissions that exported Wijaya’s gardens worldwide. He has done morethe 350 projects of varying scales, including the US ambassador’s residence in Jakarta and the Mustique Island getaway of British pop star David Bowie in the Caribbean. To the Bali Four Seasons Resort in Jimbaran went Wijaya’s latest touch. Nearly four years in the making, the Four Seasons’ breathtaking landscape combines the elements of Wijaya’s 20 years of garden-making, from the surreal swimming pool with an edge of the world ambience to the signature stone sculpture at every turn in the maze of private villas.

Bali Hyatt

Not surprisingly, Wijaya refuses to be stereotyped. His only concession to a set formula is perhaps in his use of the “tropical Costwoides” look – an illusion to a cornerof Britain frequented by Americans yearning for the old country – which critics dismiss as “messy.”
“My style is the lovely, romantic and natural English sort of garden,” he says. “But is has become fashionable and interpreted as Balinese.” The typical Wijaya landscape, he explpains, molds English color and texture with the structured expanse of Balinese temple gardens. “Ours is on the romantic side where clients have to be nature lovers enough to appreciate,” he says. Wijaya was helped along the way by research into Balinese palace architecture and visits to Javanese water gardens. His landscapes, for instance are inspired by the by the ancient capital of the East Javanese Hindu empire, Majapahit.
Wijaya indulged his passion for architecture and interior design in Hotel Saba, on the beach near Gianyar, the culmination of a life dream to do a classic formal Balinese garden on a palatial scale. Many consider the Hotel Saba the greatest Balinese folie since the Tinta Gangga water palace was built in 1992. “Folies,” a recurring theme in the Wijaya landscape, strike him as “courtly, sometimes whimsical, but always romantic and with a soft touch.” As offshoot of his dabbling in garden architecture, he has taken his design philosophy a notch higher with the launch of the Wijaya Classics range of garden furniture, lamps and art works.
It was early in his career in architecture that Wijaya saw a “weakness” in the conventional design-construct method which deprived the landscape architect total control of his work. Refusing to be roped in, he set about training what he euphemistically calls “trench commandos,” a team of master gardeners who would fan out to every project to flesh out his ideas and implement his visions. He has personally trained some 800 gardeners, about 50 of whom have graduated to the elite “green beret” corps.

Bali Hyatt

This is the core of the 500-strong PT Wijaya Tribwana International, the corporate face of Made Wijaya. It is a multi-million dollar operation out of Villa Bebek with about 40 major projects on the books each year. Some of the projects are handled from his bases in Jakarta and Singapore. Clients are known to pay anywhere from US$15,000 to US$300,00 in design fees.
Wijaya laments the creeping fear among project manager to take design risks at the landscape taste of clients improves. “I feel I am fighting a oneman battle against the Hawaiian insurgence,” he once complained to a magazine editor. He was referring to the spread of the tired, old Hawaiian influence across the Asian gardenscape. Wijaya makes originality a hallmark of his gardens, “like a couturier’s work,” and explains that his signature rambling theme gives him a wide berth to create one distinct garden from another. “A lot of architects say I can only do Balinese gardens and they all look the same,” he says. “I’ve done more than 350 gardens and everyone of them is site-and architecture-specific.”
His key ingredients for a successful garden – point of view, drama, poetry, theme, composition and lighting – are taken with a religious zeal. He says: “A landscaper is part midwife, part botanist, part sculptor and part architect. This is particularly true in the case of tropical gardens that are violently kinetic by nature.” He sees hope for his kind of innovation in new growth areas such as Vietnam, Burma, and South China. Also, hopefully, a new client understanding of his work will drive his dream to build a much-coveted botanical garden. He hopes to build one near Ubud, in the Bali Bird Park; he has received a commission to restore the Peradinia in Sri lanka.
“I’m quite proud the we’re exploring the Balinese look – the courtyard classic and the tropical Costwoides look – to places in Asia that are a little bit retarded in landscape development. When I first came to Bali, the classic garden was a concrete carpark with a few pots and cauple of Aisatians,” he says.
“Now that’s changed, not because of me but because of the boom in going back to nature.”
That might be an understatement. But Wijaya has been doing justice to his life’s work by the sheer beauty of the gardens he creates, without himself having to say it.