From Versailles in Panama while passing by Greece or the Public records, Louis Benech is a inouï "creative-handbook" attached to create the harmony between the environments landscape and architectural which it must associate.
Discrete, nice, the man puts himself little ahead; but in the microcosm of the plant, it is a reference! Great private properties, institutional companies (Hermès, Novartis, Suez) public and royal domains (Versailles, Be worth, Chaumont on the Loire, Villandry, Achilleion of Corfou....); for them all, it is a size except standard. With its only name the doors of the most exclusive fields open; and plants and shrubs even seem to be balanced more gently with the wind.
Chaumont on the Loire
TPLF: How you qualify yourselves? Architect of parks, designer of outside, gardener?
LB: In the absolute I am not large-thing; but I will say rather than I am a landscape gardener. I like to be this creative mixture - handbook which carries me with softness in the existence. I still arrive, and I almost do it with the daily newspaper, to make use of a spade and shears; and I like to make of a garden a space of balance, of softness which moderates the angular sides of the life, to conceive a federator place of peace in which each one can be found.
TPLF: Of what your know-how consists?
LB: My know-how is very chameleon and my work consists in adapting me to historical, natural, architectural data while respecting their quality but by making them evolve/move to make them more contemporary.
LB: To in no case, one should not create things which were not there at their origin. The work continued in Versailles is a concrete example: multiple floors of flowers were created at the XIX 2nd century; whereas the gardens of Lenôtre were only topiary and boxwood embroideries.
Not a place by nature does not resemble the other and it is necessary to adapt to the places while thinking about it only of one thing: the garden is and must remain a pleasure. Its owner should not be slave like that could for it be it in the past for certain gardeners. And it is necessary to think on the adequacy time, geographical situation and ground, means human and financial to maintain, in the future, the garden created.
Many people want to have fun and create a labyrinth thinking that that will amuse the children to be lost there. Do not believe not that the young people prefer to lose themselves in a numerical play? And with the owner will remain hours and hours of boxwood size or charms!
TPLF: Which was your work with Villandry?
LB: I wanted to bring a little freedom in the hectares of rigour of this property. Kitchen garden-orchard, garden of water and ornament, plants annual, boxwood kms and topiary one are enchantement made possible thanks to the many gardeners who activate themselves all the year to carry out an impressionist table in this Renaissance unit. But it was necessary me to create an imagination almost iconoclaste and to bring breath and lightness by the long-lived ones certainly but also of the graminaceous ones.
TPLF: Landscape design with the Public records
LB: To juggle between the gardens of the quadrilateral of the Files, the architectural constraints of the hotel of Soubise (closings by the stables, seen on the close hotels); it was necessary to find cement, a directing wire.¶The craftsman of this unification could be only one tree, a tree eternal, persistent; namely the umbrella pine. It is a tree always green, solid, universal, at the same time shifted for the Parisian traditional gardens and as emblematic as that which ombrait the fathers of the democracy.
TPLF: And in Versailles where you have just carried out the thicket of the water theatre?
LB: Which wonder, which challenge to work for Versailles: an infinite pleasure, an insane occasion. I do not know a place which has such an alchemy of direction, such a width. But which anguish too!
Versailles seen general
Several tracks guided farmhouse not in the design of the project:places while joining again with the idea of the water theatre made up in the beginning of multiple fountains playing with vegetable architectures and the trellis-work;the echo with childhood because the sculptures which lived the thicket were children playing; a necessary work to several hands as Ours did it which never worked only, from where my call to JM Othoniel. By redrawing this thicket, I wished to make reappear the feery and poetry inherent in the thickets of origin created by Ours.
LB: Romneya Coulteri, a semi-shrubby plant of California to the large white flowers, whose petals are like ruffled tissue paper.
TPLF: Your preferred tree?
LB: The beech with sheet of fern, a tree with the very drawn silhouette and the port perfectly defined in round.
TPLF: The word of the end
LB: The gardener is almost always in a situation full with random and surprised: one can never envisage the growth of the plants; permanently what one projects does not realize and this margin of grace leaves you in a state of humility necessary.
louis benechLouis Benech
Discrete, nice, the man puts himself little ahead; but in the microcosm of the plant, it is a reference! Great private properties, institutional companies (Hermès, Novartis, Suez) public and royal domains (Versailles, Be worth, Chaumont on the Loire, Villandry, Achilleion of Corfou....); for them all, it is a size except standard. With its only name the doors of the most exclusive fields open; and plants and shrubs even seem to be balanced more gently with the wind.
Chaumont on the Loire
Chaumont on the Loire
LB: In the absolute I am not large-thing; but I will say rather than I am a landscape gardener. I like to be this creative mixture - handbook which carries me with softness in the existence. I still arrive, and I almost do it with the daily newspaper, to make use of a spade and shears; and I like to make of a garden a space of balance, of softness which moderates the angular sides of the life, to conceive a federator place of peace in which each one can be found.
watercolour
LB: My know-how is very chameleon and my work consists in adapting me to historical, natural, architectural data while respecting their quality but by making them evolve/move to make them more contemporary.
louis benechLouis Benech
TPLF: How you represent the innovation and the necessary safeguarding of the inheritance?LB: To in no case, one should not create things which were not there at their origin. The work continued in Versailles is a concrete example: multiple floors of flowers were created at the XIX 2nd century; whereas the gardens of Lenôtre were only topiary and boxwood embroideries.
Not a place by nature does not resemble the other and it is necessary to adapt to the places while thinking about it only of one thing: the garden is and must remain a pleasure. Its owner should not be slave like that could for it be it in the past for certain gardeners. And it is necessary to think on the adequacy time, geographical situation and ground, means human and financial to maintain, in the future, the garden created.
Many people want to have fun and create a labyrinth thinking that that will amuse the children to be lost there. Do not believe not that the young people prefer to lose themselves in a numerical play? And with the owner will remain hours and hours of boxwood size or charms!
TPLF: Which was your work with Villandry?
Villandry
LB: I wanted to bring a little freedom in the hectares of rigour of this property. Kitchen garden-orchard, garden of water and ornament, plants annual, boxwood kms and topiary one are enchantement made possible thanks to the many gardeners who activate themselves all the year to carry out an impressionist table in this Renaissance unit. But it was necessary me to create an imagination almost iconoclaste and to bring breath and lightness by the long-lived ones certainly but also of the graminaceous ones.
Villandry
TPLF: Landscape design with the Public records
LB: To juggle between the gardens of the quadrilateral of the Files, the architectural constraints of the hotel of Soubise (closings by the stables, seen on the close hotels); it was necessary to find cement, a directing wire.¶The craftsman of this unification could be only one tree, a tree eternal, persistent; namely the umbrella pine. It is a tree always green, solid, universal, at the same time shifted for the Parisian traditional gardens and as emblematic as that which ombrait the fathers of the democracy.
Public records
LB: Which wonder, which challenge to work for Versailles: an infinite pleasure, an insane occasion. I do not know a place which has such an alchemy of direction, such a width. But which anguish too!
Versailles seen general
Several tracks guided farmhouse not in the design of the project:places while joining again with the idea of the water theatre made up in the beginning of multiple fountains playing with vegetable architectures and the trellis-work;the echo with childhood because the sculptures which lived the thicket were children playing; a necessary work to several hands as Ours did it which never worked only, from where my call to JM Othoniel. By redrawing this thicket, I wished to make reappear the feery and poetry inherent in the thickets of origin created by Ours.
The thicket
TPLF: Your preferred flower?LB: Romneya Coulteri, a semi-shrubby plant of California to the large white flowers, whose petals are like ruffled tissue paper.
TPLF: Your preferred tree?
LB: The beech with sheet of fern, a tree with the very drawn silhouette and the port perfectly defined in round.
TPLF: The word of the end
LB: The gardener is almost always in a situation full with random and surprised: one can never envisage the growth of the plants; permanently what one projects does not realize and this margin of grace leaves you in a state of humility necessary.
