The Story Beneath the Soil: How Mo Helmi Crafts Meaningful Outdoor Spaces
Byline: Ethan M. Stone
The Story Beneath the Soil: How Mo Helmi Crafts Meaningful Outdoor Spaces
Landscape design is, by definition, an art form involving the conscious placement of physical features within a landscape to create both functionality and aesthetic appeal.
It can be easy to reduce this concept to the simple act of placing certain plants in specific locations. Still, landscape artists like Mo Helmi recognize landscape design as a means of telling a story in itself, through elements such as form, rhythm, material, and even ecology. Helmi’s work in particular uses these and other elements to create a lived story that unfolds over seasons, inviting people into deeper engagement with nature and themselves.
Design and Its Narrative Influences
As with many artists, Helmi’s projects initially crystallize around a specific idea or emotion that may have stemmed from a particular history, place, or personal intention. He then uses narrative structure–think entry, transition, climax, rest, and so on–to organize space.
In organizing space in this way, Helmi can use spatial storytelling as a functional work of art that guides a viewer’s movement, mood, and understanding of the space around them, as well as their place within it.
A Background in Fashion and Editorial Work
Helmi’s background in fashion and visual storytelling, through editorials and collections, often shapes how he designs outdoor spaces. For instance, techniques often used in editorial work, such as moodboarding and thematic layering, are evident in how he makes decisions about landscape design.
Visual storytelling has also influenced how Helmi views the plants and materials he works with. He treats species selection like casting, with each plant playing a unique visual and ecological role. He applies a similar mindset to the materials he incorporates into a given environment.
Rather than viewing these materials as neutral, Helmi sees the stone, timber, and other materials he uses as capable of evoking specific climates or emotions. As such, even subtle physical qualities, such as texture, can help tell a story that supports an overarching concept.
Cultural Fluency Across Geographies
Having worked on both sides of the Atlantic–London, LA, Milan, and France–Helmi draws from diverse aesthetic and ecological languages to make places feel rooted and relevant in the broader contexts they exist within. In the past, this approach has taken the form of French butterfly parks and Los Angeles fire-aware gardens, both of which reflect their cultural contexts through the material and ecological choices they exhibit.
Helmi’s work doesn’t just draw on big-picture concepts; each space he designs is designed to evoke emotional states unique to its immediate surroundings. In contrast, seasonality, light, and sequence, his sites convey myriad feelings. It isn’t unusual, for example, to see stillness, openness, intimacy, and curiosity all organically displayed across a single site.
Why an Artistic Approach Matters
The ongoing surge in urbanization has ushered in a uniform, colorless environment for inoffensive appeal, erasing the narrative that once fostered attachments and formative memories.
This lack of narrative-rich environments has caused many clients to seek distinctiveness and meaning in their spaces, a need Helmi’s background is uniquely well-suited to address. His narrative approach to landscape design provides clients with the meaning they want from their environment without sacrificing ecological performance or longevity, ensuring that meaning endures for years to come.
