A green business card – company garden in Geretsried

A prestigious outdoor space for a company headquarters, where employees and clients can relax.

Location	Geretsried
Size	5,000 m² (core area approx. 2,500 m²)
Design	Jan Vandebotermet
Implementation	Fuchs baut Gärten GmbH – Gärtner von Eden
Photography	Benjamin Klopp · Klas Stöver · Night photography: Miquel Tres
Award	“Gärten des Jahres” 2021 (Callwey) – nominated and published in the book · TASPO Award 2025 · BGL Award 2025 · View the project in the competition

“The space was meant to be sophisticated and to suit the clients’ taste, with water basins and atmospheric lighting.”

— Jan Vandebotermet

The client is the Rudolf Group in Geretsried, a chemical company with around 300 employees. The result is an enclosed courtyard on a 1×1 metre grid: large-format granite slabs, three stainless steel water basins, granite seating cubes and colour-changing light cubes – the lighting design was by Werner Memmel, WML Lichtplanung. Cubic clipped yews and a pear espalier frame the space. Over the years the garden has been carefully developed further – with the addition of a swimming pond, a Zen garden and more planted areas; in 2025 the perennial beds were replanted – initiative and design: Sebastian Lechner, master landscape gardener, while our own maintenance team looks after the garden on an ongoing basis. In 2025 the project won the TASPO Award and the newly introduced BGL Award “Bestes GaLaBau-Projekt Firmengarten” (best landscape gardening project, company garden) – presented in Berlin by BGL President Thomas Banzhaf (Report in DEGA GALABAU). The garden as it is today appears in the Callwey reference book “Landschaftsarchitektur 2026”.

Eleven years on one garden

This project is not a job that was completed and closed. We designed it in 2014 and built it in 2017 – and ever since, we have continued to develop the garden together with the company. That is often the case with company grounds: they grow along with the business.

In terms of design, the garden follows the building. The new office building is open and has large areas of glass – the garden had to take up this openness and at the same time link the different building styles on the site. That is why there is no zoning that draws boundaries, but areas that flow into one another.

There are bee colonies on the grounds

The hives bear the company’s name – the bees belong to the company, they are not decoration. For us, this is the best feedback a company garden can give: what was planted here is food. Roses, cranesbill, perennials spread across the whole season – grounds where bees actually find something look different from a lawn with topiary. How we build plantings for this is described under Perennial planting and Environment and biodiversity.

The largest element of the garden is water. Alongside the three basins in the courtyard, a swimming pond has taken shape over the years and now forms the heart of the grounds: water lilies, reeds and boulders at the edge, and the white diamond-pattern façade of the office building reflected in the water. From above you can see that building and garden do not simply sit side by side but interlock. 100 m² of water surface, 1.5 m deep, built in 2019 – a size you would otherwise expect from hotel grounds rather than a company site. It is built using masonry construction with granite-grey liner, which is why the edge is so precise. The technology: two arc-screen skimmers, a Kombi-Box V100 and a Bio-Kompaktfilter V100 – biological treatment, no chlorine. More on this: Water in the garden and Outdoor spaces for businesses.

The trees create the spaces. On grounds without fences and zones, the structure has to come from the planting: a row of slender columnar trees lines the path of small stone setts, pollarded plane trees form a canopy over the seating cubes, and a pine stands in the middle of the long water basin – the one tree that holds everything together. If you are thinking of planting large trees and shrubs, you will find background information under Trees and large trees.

And a place where nothing happens. The Zen garden is deliberately the quietest area of the grounds: gravel, an upright boulder, a pine, clipped shapes – and nothing else. On company grounds where something is always going on, that is precisely its value.

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Impressions

The line of light beneath the pavilion is reflected along its full length in the pond

The pond at blue hour, with the pollarded plane trees and the timber deck lit up

The white diamond-pattern façade is reflected in the swimming pond, with water lily leaves and reeds at the edge

The company grounds from above: building, swimming pond and gravel garden flow into one another

The swimming pond from above, surrounded by gravel, clipped topiary balls and a maple with copper-coloured new growth

Straight down from above – the flat roofs, the swimming pond and the courtyards with their square planting beds

A pine tree grows in the middle of the long water basin in the courtyard

The long water basin reflects the pine and the sky

A view between the façade struts to the swimming pond with reeds and a boulder

Pond edge with sedges, a boulder and a clipped topiary ball in front of the white wall

Pollarded plane trees and a pine above the seating cubes by the water basin

A stone water spout feeds a shallow basin, with pollarded plane trees and a trimmed hedge behind

A curving path of small stone setts leads between a row of slender columnar trees

The Zen garden: an upright boulder in the gravel, with a pine and clipped shapes

A granite seating block in the shade of an old tree

Bee colonies on the company grounds – the beekeeper lifts a honeycomb frame out of the hive

Pink shrub roses along the path of small stone setts

Hosta leaves with a small blue flower, with the red Japanese maple behind

The courtyard with the water basins, granite slabs on a one-metre grid and seating cubes

A gravel path through the courtyard, framed by flowering espalier trees and clipped yews

Birches and seating blocks by the lawn in front of the office building

A view between the façade struts to the glowing green water

From the pavilion out over the pond, with blue hour outside

A Japanese maple warmly lit in front of the blue-lit wall

The path of small stone setts lit from the side, with warmly lit trees and shrubs behind

The pavilion seen from the lawn, warm light inside, dusk outside

The design plan of the company garden: courtyards, water basins, planting beds and paths at a glance

Photos: Benjamin Klopp · Klas Stöver · Night photography: Miquel Tres · “Gärten des Jahres” 2021 (Callwey) – nominated and published in the book · TASPO Award 2025 · BGL Award 2025

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