Paul is a partner at MSR, one of Minneapolis’ largest architecture firms, so we were excited at the prospect of working on his and Peter’s home near Lake Nokomis. During our initial conversations, we got even more excited when Paul expressed interest in exploring topiary – which we’ve never worked with – and the work of Roberto Burle Marx, a legendary Brazilian landscape architect who worked in an unconventional painterly way in three-dimensional perception (it's interesting that Burle Marx work is most commonly photographed aerially… long before we’d become accustomed to Google maps). So we decided to trust this cue, and developed most of the geometric arrangement in plan view and used the topiary to create sculptural planes.