As a young child in the Philippines, Vancouver-based landscape architect Paul Sangha grew up in a very urban environment, never giving much thought to the flora that would mark his award-winning career. But it’s telling, perhaps, that some of his oldest and fondest memories are of his grandfather tending to a planter in the front window of their home. After immigrating to Canada, he enrolled at Burnaby Central Secondary School, where a drafting class planted the seed of his lifelong vocation. “The teacher was an architect, so he [gave us] an assignment to design a house,” Paul remembers, on the phone from his Mount Pleasant office. The final result was, arguably, Paul’s first project: a modest garden-oriented bungalow inspired by the esthetics of Frank Lloyd Wright. “He really opened up my eyes and I was inspired by his innovation,” Paul says.
Having graduated a gold medalist of UBC’s Landscape Architecture Program, Paul took a position with West Vancouver-based Ron Rule Consultants, working at a breakneck pace on zoning permits for commercial developments. It was a fertile training ground where he perfected his philosophy of space as the realm of fluid movement and not as a static concept. He envisions each project as a canvas, striving to create an environment with the “fewest brush strokes” possible. Eventually, he worked his way up to partner while establishing a personal style of deceptively simple spaces alive with art, green foliage plantings and trees for structure and architectural definition.
After 13 years, he hung up his own shingle, founding the eponymous Paul Sangha Landscape Architecture in 1999. Since then, the firm has won numerous awards for the stately gardens for heritage homes in Vancouver, refined parterres for Okanagan wineries and green spaces in the semi-wilds of Whistler. In addition, Paul and his team are sought after outside of B.C., with residential projects in the Bel Air, Beverly Hills and Thousand Oaks areas of Los Angeles and Pittsburg and rural Pennsylvania, as well as the master planning for a 175-acre eco-resort community on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. In 2015, Paul won a prestigious Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects for Metamorphous, a stunning, 200-foot-long Corten steel sculpture and seawall integrated into the existing shoreline that protects a private home on Point Grey Road from rising tides.
Of course, for visionaries, a garden—no matter how large—is still too limiting. Paul has been focusing much of his abilities on rehabilitating or “daylighting” creeks where they meet the ocean, with redevelopments of Tatlow Park and Rodgers Creek in West Vancouver. “We’re re-naturalizing the water course,” he explains of the process that removes rivers from concrete culverts and re-establishes a foreshore of brackish water, along with its distinctive flora and fauna.
But whether hiding a privacy fence or transforming a cement underpass into an ecologically viable waterway, Paul’s core philosophy of design remains the same: “A good landscape looks like it’s always been there.”
