Anooshey Rahim: Wild by Design

CREATIVITY AT WORK

Landscape architect Anooshey Rahim draws creativity from the earth under her feet. Constantly making and planting at her studio, she finds inspiration in a collection of curated objects that hold rich histories.

"It’s critical to the process that we surround ourselves with meaningful objects, textures, colors. It enriches the palette from which our creativity derives."

—Anooshey Rahim

Shifting landscape

Anooshey Rahim's backyard in El Cerrito, California, looks east toward the San Francisco Bay. She talks about the brick patio she designed and its storied materiality: “You can pull the thread back to so many uses throughout history."  

The landscape architect gave classic earth-red bricks subtle patterning with darker diamonds to make them “feel like a textile,” she says. “I came up with that by looking at the shadows on the ground under this tree. I wanted to recreate the shadows in the brick.”  

The patio leads into a studio on the ground floor of the house which she shares with her partner, artist Graham Laird Prentice. Rahim studied architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania—she learned the physics of construction (“it helps when you’re designing pergolas or retaining walls”) but also began to bristle at the rigidity of buildings. “Architecture is so static,” she says. “Architects want to freeze time. But you have to design for change, for death.”

Object lessons

Her practice, Dune Hai, has projects all over California and each one is different. Rahim encourages her small team of designers to work omnivorously. “We look at other industries—fashion, interiors, product design—and bring that back here. We’re ingesting forms, trying to discover formal concepts that we can arrange into a space.”  

The objects arranged in Rahim’s space are few, but significant. Pu'er cooling in a pot with two small teacups by its side, a woven basket and an ancient earthen bowl, an Arcosanti bell patinated in aquamarine, a pile of Tibetan prayer flags. “It’s critical to the process that we surround ourselves with meaningful objects, textures, colors. It enriches the palette from which our creativity derives.”  

Looking around her studio, Rahim makes more connections: “The Aeron chair has these very futuristic, sci-fi elements, like an alien skeleton, and can have a conversation with the ribs on this basket. All objects are referential, but sometimes it’s not immediately obvious.” Objects have a conversation with each other—and with Rahim and her designers. But that means leaving space for them to speak. “We could pack this room,” Rahim says. “But we have to have room for our own ideas. So, I rotate stuff in and out.”  

At Dune Hai, there’s always space for the unplanned—that’s all part of the process. “We don't want to be a part of the lineage of the Anthropocene,” she says, citing the epoch where human activity dominates environmental conditions. “We’re interacting with the wild in all its forms. We want to have as light a touch as possible.”