AsiaLIFE

Few are better qualified than Bill Grant to talk about the changing face of Phnom Penh. Johan Smits talks to the Scottish designer and landscape gardener who first settled in Phnom Penh in 1991.

The moment you walk through the gate of his villa, Eddie the Blade is watching your every gesture from behind his employer’s stretched 1960s Mercedes. One wrong move and Eddie will go for you. No, this is not London’s East End – but Scottish designer Bill Grant’s home in Toul Kok. “He’s bitten me twice,” Bill says lovingly about Eddie, one of his five rescued dogs. “He’s got a bad leg, he’s really spoiled and he’s the alpha male of the pack, but I’m the supreme male, you know.” After these reassuring words we start talking about how a self-confessed “Scottish country lad” ended up as one of Cambodia’s most respected landscape designers.

Pre-UNTAC Days

“What brought me here was an English friend who bought a house behind the Le Royal,” he explains. “She said, ‘Bill I’ve got this fantastic house, I want to build a restaurant’.” That was in 1991 before the UNTAC period. Bill not only designed the interior for his friend’s restaurant but also created the garden in front of it. The place was an immediate success with the UNTAC crowd when they arrived in Cambodia.

“The head of the U.N. mission used to come every day to the restaurant to eat and he liked the garden, so when he moved into his villa, he asked me to come and do his garden too,” says Bill. Soon the Australian ambassador’s residence followed suit, then the French embassy, and the American ambassador’s residence. “I became the instant flavour of the month,” he recalls.
 
Making the Most of Things

But Bill’s design activities are not limited to gardens. “My background is in fashion design in the 70s in London, with a Japanese partner,” he says. “We were quite successful actually.” Adopting an appropriately down-to-earth manner for a landscape gardener, Bill thinks he was just lucky to be born with good taste and the ability to use it.

“I can make the most of that particular talent, and it doesn’t really matter to me whether it is fashion or interior or landscape, you know,” he explains. To him it always comes down to the same thing – colours, textures, putting things together. Despite loving the fashion business, he’s glad he’s out of the very stressful environment that comes with it. “I really enjoy what I’m doing now, although when the hot season comes, I’d rather be doing interiors – it’s too hot outside,” he says about his landscape work in Cambodia.

Tropical Expert

When Bill first came to Asia he spent one year in Indonesia in 1979. Then he lived for three-and-a-half years in Tokyo but an acute attack of what he calls “Broken Heart Syndrome” led him to move to Thailand. “I must say, of all the places I’ve lived, this is the one I loved the most,” he says of Cambodia where he has been now for no less than 17 years. “I quite like the unstructured side of things, I feel unfettered and free here. Also, I’ve been dealing with the same people for years now, there’s a big trust between us.”

The first two people he took on were a cyclo driver and his son. They helped him put together the garden for the restaurant project back in 1991 and have been with him ever since. Now he has some thirty people working for him. “It’s very much like a family because they have been with me for so long,” he says.

That length of time has also made him an expert in tropical plants. He still does the maintenance of the French Embassy, one of his first projects, which has allowed him to learn what happens with certain plants over a fifteen-year period. “Now when I do someone’s garden, I know what it will look like in two years, five years, ten years,” he explains. “I have my trusted plants. I know which ones do well, are easy to maintain and look good all year round, so I tend to go with those rather than experimenting with new things coming in from Dalat [Vietnam] that might be good for six weeks and then die.” Calling Phnom Penh a somehow harsh environment for plants, Bill now tries to create an instant garden, which will just grow better and better.

It certainly has proved a successful approach. He has a mix of different projects including a big hospital in Kampot, an academy just outside of Siem Reap, hotels, a school, restaurants and private homes. “I quite like doing more modern buildings now because then you can get a more modernistic approach to the planting,” he explains. “But you know, it’s whatever the space demands, it’s the character of the architecture.”

Child of the 60s

While talking we are interrupted twice with phone calls from people asking for instructions or trying to arrange things. His schedule seems to overflow but his calm demeanour betrays no sign of pressure. He clearly enjoys his work. “I feel really rooted here,” perhaps the pun is intended. “I’m living in a 60s house, driving my 60s Mercedes cars – being in my sixth decennium, it’s all a matching set,” he laughs. When asked why he needs two Mercedes, the response is characteristically deadpan. “The stretched one is to take the dogs out to the beach.”

Loving old houses, Bill thinks Phnom Penh was the most beautiful city he’d ever known when he first came here. “Sadly, I’ve seen it systematically sort of destroyed,” he says. “I’m not so very happy with what is happening to this city.” But some things are definitely an improvement to him. “I must say it’s nice to go to Lucky and have an assortment of cheeses.” He recalls with a certain nostalgia the time when there were no shops, only five restaurants in the city and black-outs all the time. “It’s still wonderful though,“ he smiles.