Secret Gardens - Designing Private Realms

The most personal gardens are the ones we rarely see — hidden behind walls, perched above cities, tucked into coastal clifftops. Designing Private Realms opens twenty of them.

Curated by Secret Gardens founder and creative director Matthew Cantwell, each is an enclave built through years of collaboration between designer, client, architecture and place. Intimate, considered, and completely its own.

From a rammed-earth courtyard house in Perth to a clifftop garden above the sea, the projects move from hardy coastal grasses to dense, layered planting: landscapes made to be lived in, and to shift with the light, wind and seasons.

Opened by architect Andrea Quagliola of MORQ, Designing Private Realms is the second book from Secret Gardens — and the first from Cantilever Press, a new imprint built to give design books the object they deserve.