Wake up to your paradise

‘Paradise by Design’, from Periplus Publishing, is available at leading bookshops.

Every day of the week, the internationally renowned landscape-architect Bill Bensley is offered two or three projects that could be based anywhere in the world.

Founded in 1990, his Bensley Design Studios (BDS) is now reputedly the most sought-after in the region, with its offices in Bangkok and Bali responsible for more than 100 high-profile properties spread across 26 countries .

In the world of luxury hotels and resorts, American-born but Bangkok-based Bensley is fast gaining a reputation for eclectic, historic and quirky designs.

Many of the leading resorts and hotels in Chiang Mai, Hua Hin, Koh Samui and Phuket carry the Bensley signature.

But the architect is no stranger to extravagrant residences either, having designed Hajis House, dubbed the most beautiful in Kuala Lumpur.

Bensley and his team are currently busy producing a whopping 1,800 drawings for the new 2,000-square-metre, five-storey palace of Tuanku Mizan Zainal Abidin, the king of Malaysia and the 16th Sultan of the state of Terengganu.

Recognising his numerous prominent projects, last month's edition of Time magazine named him as one of the few designers who are changing the look and feel of luxury hotels and resorts worldwide. Last year, "Architectural Digest" called him one of the top 100 architects of the year.

A gardener by blood and a landscape designer at heart, Harvard-educated Bensley has a real knack for turning wild landscapes into mega paradises, as his second book, "Paradise by Design", reveals.

Bensley took to gardening at a young age, with much of his childhood in the 1960s and '70s spent in his family's large suburban garden. Here, he inherited an expertise in cultivating vegetables and flowers from his father, an English migrant to the United States. He was employed by most of the residents on his street to prune their gardens.

Bensley was the youngest in his class at Harvard, where he met Thai student Lek Bunnag. The two have been friends ever since, with Lek also having made his name as a designer.

Through the book, Bensley hopes to share his knowledge with the next generation of designers, especially architecture students at Chulalongkorn University, where he is a guest lecturer.

"Read it and you'll see that my goal is to make each design different from the last," he told The Nation in a recent interview at the Four Seasons Resort in Mae Rim, Chiang Mai. "Each design has a unique character. I want to evoke a response from people, an experience that has them saying, 'Wow, I've never seen that before!' That's the best compliment we [designers] can get."

"Paradise by Design" showcases a collection of 24 hotels, resorts and residences designed by BDS between 1999 and 2005.

These are scattered across Asia - from India and China to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Thailand hosts most of the BDS designs in the region and more are scheduled for Hua Hin, Phuket and Koh Samui. These include the Marriott Hua Hin, Anantara Koh Samui, Anantara Hua Hin and Marriott Phuket.

Guided by his personal design motto, "the odder, the better", as well as his love of tropical gardens, Bensley creates playful, exuberant spaces that enliven residences and resorts.

"A resort design is all about planning an experience that is different from being at home.

"The garden has to be better than anything you'll find at someone's home.

"It's not strangness for its own sake - the strangeness must be impressive and memorable," Bensley says.

His first design project in Thailand, the Four Seasons, an inland hideaway overlooking terraced rice fields and the Mae Rim Valley, is very much his "first baby".

Since the resort's opening in 1992, he has returned four or five times a year to visually police the place, pruning, replant and making general improvements.

Landscape maintenance, he says, is necessary for a successful garden.  "No area should be overgrown. No tree should have dead wood."

Like other BDS designs, the Four Seasons is styled as a personalised paradise set amid a tropical garden.

Noted for his passionate belief in ornamentation, Bensley introduced a mini rice paddy with a barn housing all sorts of fast-disappearing farming equipment.

There are winding jungle walkways, ruins and statuary -  reflecting a fusion of historic and contemporary influences.

"When it comes to resort design, I insisted on going beyond 'Thainess' to something that evokes the regional character of Chiang Mai. Most of what you see here is very Lanna. We bring in local elements, such as sculptures from Nan.  

"A rice field is the cheapest thing to do really. And we brought in farming tools to keep in a barn, which is sometimes used as a romantic-dinner venue. The guests like to learn something new to enrich their experience," he says.

 The result is a mini Lanna kingdom, dotted with tall trees that provide thick foliage for Lanna-style pavillions, a magnificent spa, contemporary residences and swimming pools.

Near the Four Seasons is another BDS design, the Howard Residence, a teakwood structure adorned with Lanna silk, sculptures and paintings.

At its centre, a green sandstone-clad swimming pool produces stunning reflections of the natural and well-lit surroundings at dusk, the Mae Rim valley in the background, the Lanna pavillions and the Lanna dining hall.

But the baby currently taking up Bensley's time is Terengganu palace, a residence for the king of Malaysia, "a really nice chap". This grand five-storey structure houses a banquet hall for 1,800 people.

"I did offer the design idea to the king. To date, we've mapped things out up to the second floor. As the king requires quite a large palace, we've produced close to two thousand drawings so far.

"We're working on a residential scale according to the traganoo style of house architecture that was popular a century ago, but mixing it with the grace of Islamic architecture.

"We try to extend the culture we're working with while keeping it local," Bensley says, adding that he has 135 people working on the project.

Having operated from his Asia base for some time now, Bensley has learnt to appreciate the cultural variations in Asian architecture.

"Each culture has a mini-culture. But what fascinates me is the thread [running through] all these cultures - how they interlink.

"I've found that a constant source of fun."