Garden & bamboo

Custom Bamboo Fences, Built by Hand

The fence styles of Kyoto temples — made for a New England yard.

Japan has a vocabulary of bamboo fences a thousand years deep: ryōanji-gaki, teppō-gaki, katsura-gaki, takeho-gaki, kinkakuji-gaki, misu-gaki, yotsume-gaki. Each has its own construction, its own degree of openness, its own place — a boundary, a backdrop, a screen for a garden corner. We build them here, to the traditional details.

Every fence begins as a CAD drawing checked against the historical form. Then Toshio builds it himself — one client watched him fit a bamboo gate between house and fence to the millimeter and wrote that it was the first bamboo gate in his neighborhood, "very elegant," latched with rope so a storm makes no noise of metal.

Living materials, honest maintenance

Bamboo weathers — that is part of its life. When a fence has gone grey and mossy, we powerwash it back to its original warmth and seal it against water. Cared for this way, it lasts many more years.

We also restore and weatherproof existing bamboo work, and build gates, shiorido garden doors, and pergolas that pair bamboo with cedar — the same combination used at temple gates in Japan.