The Gardens
Eileen Neylan, the landscape designer who shaped the estate, came for an afternoon's consultation and stayed two years. She still returns every week.
The estate was built around its gardens.
Guests who walk up from the gate at golden hour and try afterwards to describe what they saw almost never begin with the buildings. They describe a tide of planting — a thatched roof showing through it once, a curve of sandstone pool once — and everywhere the silver-grey smell of leleshwa.
This is by design. Eileen Neylan was clear from the start: the buildings would not carry the property — the gardens would. The houses would be allowed to exist inside them, half-seen on the way in and read mostly from the inside out, where they belong.
What follows is a walk through the work. The walls first, because they came first.
Asked for her honest opinion on that first walk-through, she said the buildings should probably be knocked down.
How the gardens beganThe walls hold the hill.
Joseph Kimani led the walling. The craft came with him from Soysambu, where it has been handed down for three generations — stone balanced on stone, the freestanding walls carrying no mortar at all. The stone itself was dug from the property, sorted by hand, and laid by hand.
More than fifty young people from Kasarani apprenticed on the walls, earning as they learned; two of that first crew now build dry-stone walls for Eileen Neylan on other projects, twenty kilometres away. What they made here defines the levels, holds the planted banks of the terraced beds, edges the pool and lines the paths between the villas. It is the reason the estate reads as landscape rather than as real estate.
Not bought. Commissioned.
The terracotta amphorae that anchor the beds — some over a metre tall — were made by hand in workshops at Isiolo and Vipingo, brought down by truck, painted in the shade of the yard, and placed. They are the kind of object usually imported, in pairs, from a Tuscan supplier; we had ours made in Kenya.
Five thousand plants, drawn one at a time.
Every bed was designed by hand — salvias, daisies, irises, ornamental grasses, lambs-ear, cordylines, agave, cuphea, rosemary, lavender, the occasional bougainvillea — a planting list assembled over thirty-eight years of practice and applied to one hillside above the Rift. The plans still exist, on graph paper.
The intention is layered density at every elevation — foreground, middle distance, far distance, each doing visual work — so that the eye, looking down a path or out of a window, never lands on bare ground. It lands on planting at three or four focal depths, and then on a glimpse of thatch or a glint of pool water beyond.
The gardens converge on the pool.
Free-form, lined in carved sandstone, heated year-round, and set into the hillside so the planted bank rises straight from the water. Palms anchor its corners; succulents and red-flowering vines drape the dry-stone walls along its long side. Most afternoons end here.
You won't have to think about any of this.
It is simply what you will be sitting in.
Each villa keeps its own threshold to this planting — a house glimpsed through the gardens, then reached.