Project Maxpro

Location
Oyarifa, Greater Accra, Ghana
Client
Bismark Osei Bimpong
Disciplines
Landscape, Architecture, Interiors
Role
Building modification, landscape and interiors
Site area
1,125 m²
Status
Built 2026
The garden seen from above: the house at the top, a pool and timber deck at its foot, a pergola to one side and a parking court behind the street wall.
The garden from above

THE SITE

1,125 square metres at Oyarifa, with a road along the front and another down the left side. The other two boundaries are buildings — neighbours to the right and at the back.

A house was already standing on it. We modified that, and took the interiors and the landscape in full.

Landscape plan: the house and terraces at the top, the pool and deck below them, a parking court of four bays behind the street wall, and planting beds and tree canopies along every boundary.
Landscape plan, 1:150L1

THE GARDEN

Two of the four boundaries are roads, so two needed screening and two already had it. That did more to set the plan than anything else. Parking and the wall take the road edges, the pool and deck sit in the middle where no neighbour looks into them, and the planting works hardest along the two open sides.

The schedule is 86 plants across seven species, arranged by height rather than by variety. Two Terminalia mantaly stand over the lawn. They are there for the shade, and they screen the site only in part. The rest builds the boundary from the ground up: thirty Liriope muscari and eleven Agapanthus at the ground line, eighteen Strelitzia reginae at about chest height, ten bougainvillea on the walls, and fifteen palms holding the top. The palms are eleven Rhapis excelsa and four Dypsis lutescens, both chosen because they clump to the ground rather than running up to a bare trunk.

Planting schedule listing quantity, category, Latin name and common name for seven species: Terminalia mantaly, Bougainvillea, Agapanthus Cloudy Days, Liriope muscari, Strelitzia reginae, Dypsis lutescens and Rhapis excelsa. The kitchen: grey-fronted units in a U under a recessed ceiling panel, an extractor over the hob, a window above the sink and timber doors on both sides.
Planting schedule · The kitchenL2

WHAT TO NOTICE

Nothing in the schedule is deciduous. Both categories that carry the screen are specified evergreen, and the palms, the Strelitzia, the Agapanthus and the Liriope all keep their leaves through the harmattan. A boundary that thins in the dry months is a boundary that fails in exactly the months you notice it, and that is decided at specification or not at all.

It is also what you look at. From the deck the planted edge is the view, and the flowering in this garden is all in that edge: eighteen Strelitzia reginae, eleven Agapanthus and ten bougainvillea. The planting that keeps the road out is the same planting that gives the garden its colour.

WHERE THIS STOPS BEING TRUE

The perennial palette is arranged to be read as well as to work. It runs warm to cool as it steps down toward the viewer: bougainvillea on the wall, Strelitzia orange in front of it, Agapanthus blue below that, Liriope green at the ground. The palms sit above the whole run as a higher layer of the same green. All of it takes full sun here and asks little of anyone once it is established.

Once established is the load-bearing phrase. The colour run and the stepped heights are a maintained condition rather than a built one, and they hold for as long as someone keeps the Strelitzia out of the Agapanthus and cuts the bougainvillea back off the wall. Planting is the only material on a site that goes on changing shape after handover. The first two seasons are the exposed ones: none of this reaches the height it is drawn at without water and weeding the rain will not supply on its own.