S'Estepa's Pedro Campaner and Sofia Grimaux on how a garden takes shape in Mallorca — the conversation with the client, walking the land, the drawings and measurements, the work on site, and the garden that becomes the best room in the house.
A garden starts long before the first plant. It begins with an idea — and often with a drawing spread across a table, or a slow walk through a finca, looking at the land, the light, an old dry-stone wall, a view, an olive tree that stood there long before we arrived.
Every project begins by talking. We share the first sketches early and keep talking as they develop — discussing, questioning, refining, and now and then changing direction together. There is no friction in it: the client and the studio are working toward the same thing, and that thing is the garden. When everyone is pulling in one direction, the decisions come easily.
Before We Draw a Garden, We Walk the Land
We spend time on the site and watch how it changes through the day — where the morning sun falls, where the afternoon shade holds, how the house meets the landscape, where the views want to open and where the garden should offer a little privacy. We read the levels and proportions, the existing trees, the stone, the character of the countryside around it. Much of the design is already suggested by the place itself, for anyone who takes the time to look.
Then We Draw
Plans turn into conversations. Measurements turn into decisions. An idea is tested, adjusted and drawn again; materials are weighed, plants are chosen, one space is joined to the next. Pedro and Sofia move constantly between the drawing table and the ground — checking a dimension, marking a line with spray paint, standing where a path will run to feel whether it is right. It is technical work, and it is also drawing, proportion, instinct and inspiration.
The construction, the site management and the hundreds of small decisions belong to this stage too — along with the things no one can plan: a discovery made while digging, a choice taken on site, a detail resolved around a table. These are what gradually bring a garden to life.
The Garden Becomes the Best Room in the House
The aim through all of it is straightforward — to create spaces that hold you, gardens that work on the senses, places that feel right for the people who will live in them.
Over the years the garden settles in. It fills with long lunches and summer evenings, children on the grass, quiet mornings with coffee, friends arriving — until it becomes the part of the house everyone gravitates to. A living legacy shaped by the land, by the people who spend their time in it, and by the seasons that pass over it.
It starts with a conversation. It grows through the walking, the drawing, the measuring and the building.
The garden, in the end, is all of us.
-card.webp)
