Linda Garland's Bali Houses by Caroline Phillips
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Ubud Hanging Gardens
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Linda Garland, 57, has decorated tropical houses for David Bowie, Richard Branson and Mick Jagger. “I gave one of these to Catherine Deneuve,” she says pointing at her collection of Javanese hats that she has turned into lampshades in her own sitting room in Bali. “She wears it cocked on her head.” Mention almost any name – from Donna Karan to Bono -and Linda will not only be friends with the person but will, most likely, have designed for him or her a little bamboo something. For Linda is also the Queen of Bamboo, about which more later.
Linda lives far from her birthplace. One of two children, she grew up in a castle in County Durham, Ireland. “My mother was running a vast estate. So nobody noticed that I didn’t go to school,” she says, softly spoken. She wears flowing clothes and no makeup. “Instead I hung out with the gypsies and spent a lot of time building tree houses.” (Her father was a Battle of Britain pilot who survived the ordeal physically but not psychologically.) She left school at 14. “I was barely able to write.”
Aged 20, she had a terrible car accident. “My uncle gave me GBP 2000 for having survived,” she explains. “I almost didn’t.” She turned the GBP 2000 into GBP 4000, and then kept doubling the figure. “I’d jump onto cargo boats, go to Haitii and places and find designs which I’d put on fabrics to sell in London.” When people kept asking her what to do with the material, she moved into interior design. She has an extraordinary sense of beauty.
A Renewable Resource
Now Linda is focusing her energies on the environment. As we sit eating tropical fruits from her garden, she keeps jumping up. First she wants to show me a bamboo surf board. Next she produces a picture of a bamboo bicycle and samples of bamboo flooring. “Look at this,” she says, her voice rising in excitement as she thrusts some fluffy material into my hand. “Bamboo clothes, bamboo towels...” Bamboo grows a metre a day. It’s a renewable resource. That’s why Linda started the Bamboo Foundation in 1990.
Linda has lived in Bali since 1974. “I came here on holiday. It felt as if I’d arrived in heaven and didn’t have to be good. It was wild.” Instead of recruiting the help of an estate agent to find a plot, she walked the island with an English bird and butterfly specialist. But she didn’t buy until 1978 - after she’d married an Indonesian and become a citizen, thereby gaining the right to purchase. “Over the years, I’ve acquired the neighbouring land, to protect myself from developments,” she says. “I’ve bought from 35 different owners over 10 years. Sometimes I had to get 50 signatures on one title. Sometimes it took years to do.”
She has built a home and four rental properties in 30 lush acres bordering the monkey forest near Ubud, home to crafts and artists in Bali. The houses overlook bamboo forests, frangipani trees, a river and a squiggly-shaped swimming pool surrounded by volcanic rock. She built them from materials that she grew - from ylang ylang for the thatched roofs to bamboo for the structures and woven walls.
“I grow my own houses,” she says. “As I bring in a crop, I build a house.” She also designed and created everything in them - from bamboo furniture right down to nearly all the home furnishings. “One builder said to me, ‘The only reason Rome wasn’t built in a day was because you weren’t the foreman.’”
Traditional Balinese Style
Her home is in traditional Balinese style on stilts. Designed to catch the breeze, all the rooms are interconnecting and open to the garden. The house boasts her trademark look of English-colonial-meets -East and white-on-white. There are bamboo opium beds, plantation chairs, bamboo tables, rugs, chairs and light fittings. (Yes, even halogen tubes are set in bamboo.)
Everywhere there are beautiful nic nacs – from old rattan baskets to antique water carriers. (“I put silver borders on them to give them my look.”) The floors are of recycled electrical poles and terracotta tiles. There’s a catering- style kitchen of bamboo and steel and a romantic bedroom with a bed that is draped in acres of white mosquito net hanging from the ceiling. Now divorced and with two grown up sons, she lives alone.
Linda is one of those extraordinary people who make things happen. She has garnered leadership awards and an honorary PHD. She has revived or started forty different crafts on the island. When 15 Balinese women were sent to prison in the Eighties for wrenching up coral, Linda negotiated their release in exchange for giving them jobs doing needlepoint. Their exquisite petit -point cushions adorn her house. Now she’s getting architects and designers the world over to consider the benefits of bamboo. It’s hard not to imagine that we’ll all be using it soon…
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