Meet Leon Hordijk

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Leon Hordijk a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Leon, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

Frequent change has created a lot of resilience in my life. From an early age I have had to often adapt and change due to a variety of factors like moving to a new city or country, bullying, work opportunities etc. This has in turn allowed me to become very resilient and be able to roll with the punches. In fact, this has been so foundational to my life, that now I often seek out change to offer a new perspective or opportunity. I have found, the opposite is also true, that stagnation can be a killer for development and creativity.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I have a deep love for the outdoors, ecology and nature. This is the inspiration for my life, as well as my career. I am a landscape architect with a focus on helping build connections to our environment, and more specifically thru the medium of plants and planting design. My business ‘studio foliosa’ is a full spectrum landscape architectural practice, where we split our time doing consulting work for other landscape architectural offices as a way to share and spread our expertise, as well as taking on our own projects.

Ultimately our expertise lies in planting design which we use as a tool to encourage more folks to build a relationship with their outdoor spaces. We want them to also fall in love with the fine details of ecology that make the outdoors so special-whether it be the symbiotic relationship of a endemic moth to a specific plant, the texture or color of a plant specimen, or the story of water to the land.

I left a good job in San Francisco in 2019 after having been in the industry for about 8yrs, to pursue my own practice and really hone in on my expertise of using planting design as a tool to craft meaningful spaces in different regions. It was also an opportunity to travel and explore different parts of the world, and observe our craft in other places. Here we are another 6 years later, still pursuing the same mission. Although it has been challenging at times, it has also been rewarding to see the growth, both personally and professionally.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Stay true to yourself. There will always be inputs/outputs that pull you in different directions. Whether it be project types that you dislike but pay the bills, or jobs that just don’t suit you. If you keep your vision intact of who you are and what you ultimately want, you can always find a way back to it with enough effort.

2. For me personally, my love for plants and horticulture has really been a theme that both transformed my appreciation for landscape architecture during my time at university, and something I have really grasped onto as my specialty during many different times in my career.

3. Be kind and build connections with people. Nobody wants to work with people they don’t like. In the US especially, we spend so much of life working, so why make it miserable for yourself or others? After having reflected on this recently, some really great opportunities in my career have come from relationships that I have built in the past, that have really allowed me to elevate into chances to prove myself professionally.

Tell us what your ideal client would be like?

An ideal client is someone who wants to hire me or my company for the mission we are after, and the specific design style we innately already have. This fosters a collaborative environment and an appreciation/trust in our craft.

In the past especially, the least ideal clients are folks who hire you to fulfill their specific vision that is so far from what you offer. Think “i want an formal ornamental topiary garden in California” when what we are designing are forward thinking, drought tolerant, native plant focused and more ‘wild’ landscapes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.foliosa.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/studio.foliosa/?hl=en

Image Credits

All content was created by me, including built project photos. Photo of myself was image taken by my wife Molly Bacon