“The stars are the coconuts,” Bill Bensley tells me from Bangkok. A renowned landscape architect and a kind of Willy Wonka of gardening, Bensley has long been associated with all things maximalist and also unordinary: the father of a ruggedly Southeast Asian style that touches some 230 hotels and resorts across 30 countries around the world—from Bali to Bhutan, Udaipur, and The Congo, from the world's first edible golf course in St Kitts to The Royal Istana, an actual King's palace in Malaysia.
Never, though, have there been quite so many eyes on a single project of his as they are currently with that of the Four Seasons Koh Samui, the jungle-sunken tableau for the latest go-'round of The White Lotus. It is the principle setting for the new season (much like the role that the San Domenico Palace in Sicily played in season two), which now makes Bensley The White Lotus's new Gardener-in-Chief.
When the Harvard-educated aesthete first encountered its verdant grounds, cupping the Gulf of Thailand, in the 2000s, he clocked one thing, he informs Town & Country: “Like much of Koh Samui, that site was a coconut plantation. I went and counted 854 coconut trees when we started.”
“And at the end of the day,” he declares proudly, “there were 854 coconut trees.” They built around them, that is to say. “Sometimes they go through floor number one, through floor number two, and come out the roof of number three.”
It’s all part of the prevailing Bill Bensley philosophy: “If you start with the ground...if you start with respect for Mother Nature, and how things grow and how things move, then everything else falls into place.”
The average age of these trees on-site? Approaching 100 years. They grow about one foot per year, and the way the coconuts reflect light is intriguing: After the sun sets, “their lighting is reversed,” he explains, “going from the natural sun to reflecting the artificial lights down below.”
Something that happens to jive neatly with the moody setting of the property (“at night, they look like eyes in the hills,” the hotel's general manager, Jasjit Assi, likes to say about their hillside villas), but also the familiarly light-and-dark beats of the hit HBO series—from the psycho-dynamics, this season, of the Ratliff family, led by Parker Posey and Jason Isaacs, to the frenemy cesspool that includes Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, and Leslie Bibb.
It was a palm tree tutorial that Bensley gave Mike White when The White Lotus creator was scouting locations in Thailand and came to his place for dinner. Dubbed Baan Botanica, the pad in Bangkok doubles as a laboratory for Bensley and his long-time partner, fellow horticulturalist Jirachai Rengthong, and is, it's safe to say, one of the wildest homes in the world: a more-is-more, 34,400-square-foot space with some 700 varieties of plants.
White was so dazzled, he even suggested shooting some scenes of his show in the house. Bensley politely turned him down.
The origin story of this green-thumbed impresario? It began far from the paddies and the shrines of Asia. In Southern California. ”Orange County,” the 66-year-old Bensley says, “when Orange County still had oranges.” Raised on a small farm—his own Silent Spring of rabbits and quail, bee sanctuaries, and mushrooms galore—the natural world was always a murmur. Self-sustainable: a way of life, not a hashtag, complete with a clan that would regularly set off for camping trips, often in the Sierras.
Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood probably edged its way into his aesthetic, he concedes, given his penchant for showmanship, as did his father's line of work. A research mechanic for NASA, Kenneth Bensley “actually built some of the parts that went into the space shift for the Gemini Project,” which paved the path for a spacecraft to go into orbit.
“For better or for worse,” his son says with a laugh today, “he headed up the toilet division. The toilets that went into space for the moon mission.”
From Apollo 11 to The White Lotus? Dad may have been peering at the skies, while this Bensley weaves whimsy from the ground.
“This need to create,” he muses, adding that his father was also a very curious man who “read everything up until he was 88. He lived with us in Bangkok for the last 20 years of his life.”
A wrong number set Bill on his flora-filled destiny, as goes the oft-told story. He was trying to call the Anaheim police station to see if a policeman could come to his high school for a school assignment, but he somehow got Rocco Campanazzi, a landscape architect, on the phone instead. It was the beginning of a life-long friendship.
His studies eventually took him to Boston, where he studied urban design under famed architect Moshe Safdie. Later, he followed a friend to Singapore, a base from which he began designing gardens around the region.
“I had no idea what hospitality design was,” he says, the job of landscape architec still being a nebulous category in the 1980s. “And I had zero idea where Singapore was.”
After five years conjuring resorts, he moved to Bangkok to launch his own studio, and the very same week he met Jirachai Rengthong. Bensley Design Studio comprises today some 140 employees, headquartered from a leafy compound that once housed the Iraqi embassy.
My own initiation with all things Bensley happened, I tell him, when I visited the Four Seasons Chiang Mai, in the northern reaches of Thailand, last year. Opened back in 1995, this was his first garden-style resort and still enchants: set amidst a working rice farm, it's a cornucopia of water lilies, over-bridges, steep teak pavilions, rushing rivers, ducks passing, water buffalo, sculptures galore, and green upon green.
It's the kind of place where a daily rite of passage includes a farmer's procession at the dot of 5 pm, mist rising up over Mae Rae Rim Valley. And where even last year they were already bracing themselves for the so-called “White Lotus Effect,” most certainly set to spill over from their sister property in Koh Samui and yet another property on the Thai border with Laos and Myanmar, the Four Seasons Tented Camp Gold Triangle.
At all these properties, and more, Bensley is still “tinkering” with the landscaping, he confirms. “It is not something I finished 20 or 30 years ago,” he says. “It is something I am constantly doing.”
“I’m a gardener first,” is something that Bensley also often says—although, it's not strictly true. He is also a painter, a practice that he picked up during the pandemic, and has turned into the proverbial side-hustle. Partial to large-scale, surreally colored canvases, this renaissance man is in the throes of a three-part rotating exhibition at the MOCA Bangkok, all the sales from which benefit his Shanti Mani Foundation, supporting underprivileged communities in Cambodia.
One series dubbed The Ring of Fire explores Bensley’s fascination with fire and volcanoes, drawing inspiration from travels everywhere from Uzbekistan to Japan. Another, The Silk Road Chronicles, is a series of paintings which illustrate his real and unreal travels as “the gay son of Genghis Khan”—something he is planning to turn into a musical!
Asked, finally, if he could be a tree or plant, which one would he be, he explodes with a full-bellied laugh and then gives the only possible answer: “A coconut tree. I like that it bends in the wind, and has the ability to be flexible, and to grow. To live a long time.”
A long-time columnist in Canada—currently for the Toronto Star—Shinan Govani has carved out a niche as both society gadfly and pop culture analyst. He is also the author of the novel Boldface Names. Photo by George Pimentel.
