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Fenêtre sur cour

A garden with a view

2026 - ongoing
Rotterdam, NL
Private garden
18 sq.m

Some gardens are made to be walked through; this one is made to be watched. Magda’s courtyard sits at the angled end of a narrow house in Rotterdam-West, barely eighteen square metres, seen far more often than entered, framed almost always through the glass wall that closes the house.

The window does what a screen does: it holds a scene. So the design starts there, with the view, and the garden's task becomes to carry you elsewhere the moment you look up from the table.

The take is to build the courtyard as a backdrop, a scenery composed for the frame, made to transport whoever faces it somewhere far larger than the plot allows.

At this size, depth has to be constructed: planting layered front to back, a few big rocks to hold the eye and anchor the scene, a horizon suggested where there is no room for a real one. The garden becomes a window onto an elsewhere.

Three “views”

Finding the right elsewhere meant drawing three of them. Each option is a complete world, shown twice, once as the view through the glass, once as a plan of the same small footprint. Setting them side by side was a way to narrow Magda's own wish: to see which atmosphere she wanted to live beside.

An English yard: a central floor of gravel to sit on, loose flower beds, the soft cottage register of perennials around a single tree the most open and familiar of the three.

A rock garden, drawing openly on the Japanese and Asian art of the constructed miniature landscape: stones and spare planting composing a natural rocky scene in a few square metres, the boulders doubling as seats.

A subtropical jungle: ferns and vines closing in around large boulders, the most immersive of the three, giving up openness for the feeling of being taken over by green.