“This garden is made for my camera” says Marco Valdivia. Unlike the Wirtzes’ commissioned gardens, this former kitchen garden was never conceived as a formal composition: a complete work of art. Rather, it is a working nursery in active use, a laboratory for continuous experimentation, in which plants are moved, transferred to other plots or to gardens in progress elsewhere.

Few landscape designers are more admired than Belgium’s Jacques Wirtz, as seen with the huge success of The Wirtz Gardens, published in the fall of 2004. The Wirtz Gardens surveyed 57 private and public gardens designed by Wirtz, many in collaboration with his two sons, Martin and Peter, in locations spanning the globe. Like the veteran art dealer whose personal collection one imagines to be stupendous, the volume raised the question of what Wirtz’s own garden looked like.

The Wirtz Private Garden now answers that question. At the family home in Schoten (near Antwerp)–a former gardener’s cottage attached to an eighteenth-century estate–Wirtz and his family have created a laboratory for experimenting with plants, shrubbery, borders and pathways on an intimate scale. And the photographer Marco Valdivia, photographer for The Wirtz Gardens, has produced a unique meditation on the subtle effects of light, space and form in the garden through the seasons.

Valdivia shoots on film, not digital, and consequently his photographs show a depth and clarity of definition that is unsurpassable. His sensitivity to the Wirtz aesthetic and to the textures of nature make this book one of the finest photographic studies of an intimate garden ever published.

Jacques Wirtz(pictured left) was born in 1924 in Antwerp. He studied landscape architecture at a horticultural college in Vilvoorde before starting his own business, growing and selling flowers and maintaining local gardens. In 1950, Wirtz designed his first complete garden, inspired by the gardens of his childhood and those seen on visits to other European countries and Japan. He gained recognition in the early 90s when he won a contest to redesign France’s Carrousel Garden, which connects the Louvre with the Tuileries Gardens.

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Click here to visit Jacques Wirtzes’ website.

Click here to visit Marco Valdivia’s website.

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A client of Inform came in with an estimate the other day. It was dated November 13th, 1989. The client wanted to know if we would honour the estimate even though it was over 20 years old.

“I do not think we can do that” replied the salesperson.

Yet upon further examination of the estimate, the salesperson replied:

“I can’t honour it, but I can do one better. $200 better”.

The item in question was an Artemide Tizio Classic Black Table Lamp by Richard Sapper. In 1989, the lamp was $655. However in 2010, Inform sells the exact same light for $431. That’s $224 less!

There has been a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in our economy over the last 21 years. We all know this. A gallon of milk now is $4.89 compared to $2.34 in 1989.

However, sometimes in our market, deflation can happen.

So, remember those great pieces of furniture you couldn’t afford 20 years ago? They may just be in your price range now…

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Nancy and Niels visited a tiny store opened by British designer Jasper Morrison on their recent trip to London. The store is very tucked away, only a few visitors a day,  and is actually housed in an unused area of Morrison’s studio. The design of the shop is simple, wooden shelves are stocked with Morrison’s own designs and those of his peers such as designers Sori Yanagi and Naoto Fukasawa.

There is currently a really lovely display of items for the Super Normal book by Fukasawa and Morrison (pictured above left). The book is a compilation of 204 everyday objects in search of ’super normal design’.

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“The shop was opened because we had some extra space in our new office, and after the super normal exhibition (at axis gallery tokyo) I wanted a continuation of the contact that it provided me, with everyday, useful things. My feeling is that design which follows the current ‘entertainment’ model which attaches more importance to media exposure than to the real-life performance of an object has run its course, and that it’s time for designers to shape up and design things which have built-in long-term performance. The shop is an idealistic showroom for those things, rather than a commercial venture, though you may leave with less money than you arrived!”

– Jasper Morrison

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The only picture allowed to be taken inside the store.

The Jasper Morrison shop is located at 24b Kingsland road, London and is open Monday to Friday, 11am to 5pm.

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Click here to visit Jasper Morrison’s official website.

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