Wijaya, defender of Balinese style

Wijaya, defender of Balinese style

Marilyn August, Associated Press/Sanur, Bali

The former tennis pro is the doyen of Asian landscape designers
and the self-appointed watchdog of Balinese style.

The 51-year-old Australian-born Michael White -- who now goes
by the Hindu name of Made Wijaya -- is perhaps the most
influential landscape artist working in Southeast Asia.

His signature "tropical Cotswold" style is synonymous with
this resort island itself. The "ordered jungle" look -- abundant
with color, texture, poetry, whimsy and romance -- seduces guests
at dozens of luxury hotels, large and small, where Wijaya has
left his mark the past 25 years.

"I'm against gardens that look like they're machine-made or
computer-generated," he says during an interview at Villa Bebek
(Duck Villa), his home and office complex in this sleepy town on
Bali's eastern coast. "I believe in designing the squirrel in the
garden."

Wijaya has made his mark on some 600 gardens in Indonesia,
Singapore, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur and Hawaii.

And he has designed homes and gardens for the rich and famous,
including the dream house of pop star David Bowie on the island
of Mustique in the West Indies and the Jakarta residences of the
U.S. and Australian ambassadors to Indonesia.

Current projects include a hotel on Bali for Bulgari, the
Italian luxury group, the architectural design for a spa in the
Botanical Gardens in Putrajaya, Malaysia, a boutique hotel in Hoi
An, Vietnam, and a book on Indian gardens.

Wijaya's design sensibility was born during a visit to
England, where he was charmed by the traditional country garden,
in general -- and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in
particular.

His Bali-based landscape architecture company, which employs
about 350 Balinese gardeners, averages about 40 projects a year
across the region. But Wijaya also is busy crusading to save
Balinese style and culture from what he considers trivialization.

"I love style, but I hate fashion," says Wijaya, wearing an
impeccably tailored dress shirt and traditional Balinese sarong.
Venting his grievances in a feisty, long-running Stranger in
Paradise column in a local English-language magazine, he has
protested perching fragrant yellow and white frangipani flowers
on urinals at the Denpasar airport, and railed against ads that
promote Bali using "young white nubile females wearing no
panties."

"My dream was to be Albert Schweitzer or Richard Burton, and
instead, I ended up as Tony Soprano," Wijaya says, referring to
the middle-age boss of the fictional DiMeo crime family in the
popular American TV series.

He is also proud of his most recent book, a compilation of
photos he has taken over 30 years that is a study of traditional
Balinese architecture and landscaping and their influence on
contemporary Balinese design.

"The Architecture of Bali is my greatest achievement because I
was working against the clock. So many of the places I
photographed 25 years ago have vanished. Now, there is a record,"
he says.

He sees the book as a rampart against the "pretty litter" of a
new design trend that ignores the classical language of Balinese
architecture.

Wijaya first visited Bali at age 19. Armed with an
architecture degree, he later returned for good, embracing the
language, culture and the Hindu religion, to which he converted
after spending seven years with a Brahmin family.

Villa Bebek, with its nine pavilions and six water gardens, is
his favorite work-in-progress. On a recent afternoon, the air
thick with humidity and fragrance, the garden seemed a careless,
rambling maze of greenery bordering on the unkempt.

Visitors find their way through a jumble of creeping, potted
and hanging tropical plants and flowers thanks to stepping stones
adorned with statuary from around Indonesia.

A showcase of authentic Balinese architectural design, the
villa is a marriage of inside and out. "It's a reversal of
traditional home design. The furniture is on the outside, the
plants are on the inside," Wijaya says.

For him, Balinese style is simply "the most perfect
architectural language, in terms of scale, beauty and
functionality that ever evolved in the tropical world."

Wijaya describes himself as an artist who thrives on getting
dirt under his nails.

"The incredible thing about gardening in the tropics is that
you're always living on the edge of fecundity -- every six months
you can get out the chain saw and chop it all down and create a
whole new conception. You can experience all the different cycles
of nature."