Vogue Living Australia Magazine, January 2000

Avant Gardener
Inspiration from a one-time Australian Embracing Paradise

Text by Frannie Hopkirk | Photographer by Tim Street-Porter

THE GARDENER SLIPS OFF HIS SHOES and settles cross-legged into his favourite chair. At his bare feet, two dogs lie sleeping; another three move slowly through leafy shadows. Nearby, exotic birds in their cages are being covered as night approaches.
The smells of garlic, coriander, ginger and chilli waft from the kitchen.

A small picket fence, almost a toy, is lightly placed beside us to delineate inside from outside, a symbolic gesture performed at dusk. Here the divisions between garden and buildings, plants and architecture are nebulous. Nature is everywhere.

The man sitting in the chair is Made (pronounced Mah-day) Wijaya. Villa Bebek at Sanur Beach, Bali, is his home and his studio. Born in Australia, Made Wijaya is also known as Michael White. But along with taking on a new name when he moved to Bali, Wijaya has integrated himself into the local culture in profound ways. So much so that he has become known as one gardeners of the tropical world. Nature is his inspiration, the key element here.

Sitting back with a gin and tonic in hand, looking out over his garden, Wijaya declares, “Villa Bebek is my muse in a way. A testing ground too. “Richly textured, always surprising, Villa Bebek is a gorgeous, fecund world of lights, pools, paths, courtyard and pavilion, fragrant with early evening in the tropics. Seven thatched-roof villas are scattered throughout the 2700-square-metre garden, which was once a palm grove. This make up Wijaya’s working complex and his private world – guest quarters, workshops, studios, swimming pool and water tower. Fifty people have been known to sit down to lunch in one of many courtyards. For now, there is a more intimate, contemplative mood.
“You are only as good as your last garden,” Wijaya says as he explains what motivates him. “All gardens require maintenance and control. In the tropics, growth can happen very fast. An English garden can take 300 years to consolidate – Bali, it can be out of control in one year, the original structure vanishing under rampant growth.”

It requires a special hand to work with suck forces. Villa Bebek, now 10 years old, is a masterpiece of intimate garden design, a crystallization of something essentially Balinese. It achieves the mystic calibration between man and nature, a union fundamental to understanding the Hindu philosophies that underpin Balinese society. With a quirky, startling hybrid combining English cottage, Balinese temple and Sydney kitsch, it’s also a quintessential Wijaya statement.

‘Jenny Kee, Ian Bent, not too precious, Noddy – but nice,” he jokes the next morning, defining his idiosyncratic style over a poolside breakfast.
Loosely constructed in the old manner of a family compound, the seven pavilion of Villa Bebek are enclosed between two skin – an outer wall bordering the street on two sides and an inside wall containing service and staff quarters, garages and storage. Each building and courtyard has its own traditional carved, painted gate, with privacy enhanced by ponds or walls, which in turn offer the pleasure of repeatedly crossing thresholds. Transition from room to room, space to space, is frequently accompanied by the gentle percussion of double wooden doors opening and closing. These are the sounds of a Balinese house, along with the padding of bare feet on cool, stone floors, voices carried on soft winds, and laughter. In April the shackles of shutters (for the rains) are thrown aside, and blinds are rolled up and put away until next year. An absence of glass (except for the occasional mirror) leaves the rooms in nature’s embrace, with sooty shade and the play of filtered sunlight.

More than a home, Villa Bebek is headquarters for the creative powerhouse PT Wijaya Tribwana Internasional, with a staff of eight designers, carvers and “commando gardeners.”

Wijaya landscaping project (more than 400 to date), include David Bowie’s house in Mustique; the Bali Hyatt,Sanur; the Amandari Resort and Taman Bebek; the Oberoi, Legian; the Hyatt Regency,Singapore and the Four Seasons Resort, Jimbaran Bay. The Four Seasons is a masterful braiding of European and Balinese chic with every Wijaya trick in the book – gardens for lovers, cold rock pools alongside hot ones, follies, winding paths, cozy courtyard, ancient frangipani dropping blooms like cosmic confetti. Resembling a Balinese village from above, the resort curves slowly down the bay, pat private thatched-roof guest-houses to small beaches and a restaurant on the water. Current projects include the design, production and export of his signature garden lighting, called Wijaya Classic, and revival of 40s and 50 s Hawaiian house and garden furniture.

Penetrating blue eyes and Celtic ‘othernesses set Wijaya apart from his Asian brothers. But this is a culture without an artistic ‘class’: in Bali, everyone is a painter, carver, poet, builder, musician or dancer and while Wijaya has become a part of the community, the intense Westerner is still present. Anthropologist, horticulturist, historian, raconteur, fabulist, dancer, photographer, hedonist and hard worker, Wijaya still calls himself an expatriate in Bali,” a stranger in paradise”.

It’s the name he gives to his regular column for the Bali Post and the numerous other publications that syndicate it. Stranger in Paradise (Wijaya Words), a published selection of columns, is filled with juicy photographs and gossip and reports of ceremonies and rituals.

His definitive work, Tropical Garden Design (Thames & Hudson), recently released worldwide, is a ravishing testament to his love for the living art of the tropics, and Wijaya is now compiling “an incomplete history of Balinese architecture” calls Towards an Encyclopedia.

Through Wijaya one comes to understand that Bali is sumptuous and merry with life. Daily spiritual observances of the Balinese are celebrations. A child-like purity infuses the senses: a fleeting moment can seem etched with meaning here, and somehow beyond time it self.

It was this existential character that captivated the young architecture-school drop-out almost 30 years ago. Legend has it the he swam ashore from his ketch through shark-infested waters, and was adopted by a local Brahmin family, generations of which are close to him still. He soon acquired a working knowledge of Balinese aesthetics, traditions, history, religious rituals, buildings and gardens.

He also quickly learnt high Balinese, considered one of the most difficult languages in the world, as well as other regional dialects.As we leave a house near Kuta after dinner one evening, I am transfixed by a huge, elevated stone post spilling white bougainvillea in the sultry light. ”It’s all Made Wijaya.
He started it all!” says our host, almost reverently. “He caused and made art from the Balinese/European hybrid; in a sense, he handed the beauty of the place to the world.”