How Paul Bangay, Australia’s most celebrated garden creator, went from sustainability to ostentation and back again.
Paul Bangay is looking at a bare patch of dirt in the vegetable garden at Stonefields, the 20-hectare property in Victoria’s central highlands he bought in 2004 and turned into one of the country’s most significant and admired gardens.
Bangay is waiting for settlement on Stonefields, which he sold for $11 million in January to a resort consortium fronted by celebrity gardener Jamie Durie. His husband, Barry, a gentle-voiced Irishman whom he married in 2014, spends most of his time here while Bangay splits his week between Sydney and Melbourne, meeting clients and working with his nine staff. His studio designs between 70 and 80 gardens a year.
The house resembles an Italian villa and overlooks a deep valley. Pointing towards the view is a rectangular pond flanked by identical rows of precision-cut buxus half-cubes, like square buttons, that march towards the horizon. Bangay’s living room is the lair of a serious bibliophile: a place of deep sofas and dark-wood surfaces, monumental limestone fireplace ablaze, and stacks of magazines on the plush ottoman. One of the bookcases swings open to reveal the main bedroom and four-poster bed.Even before he finished his course at Burnley Horticultural College in Richmond, Bangay had designed his first large-scale garden: Larundel, the 19th-century sheep station near Ballarat owned at the time by the Kimberley family.
John Coote with Robert Doble, Paul Bangay and an Irish wolfhound at Coote’s Irish estate, Bellamont Forest, which Bangay describes as like being in a Cecil Beaton painting.Hicks encouraged Bangay in his love of British and Continental garden traditions, but also encouraged him to move on from pastiche towards a style of his own, one that echoed Australian Edna Walling’s style with its romantic mix of stone walls, swaths of bulbs and a smattering of natives.
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