Pleasant Place 6
Delivered to Stack subscribers in Oct 2024

by Steve Watson in November 2024

Presented as, “A growing collection of publications about the art of gardening”, each issue of Pleasant Place takes a different theme to guide its green-fingered investigations. This sixth issue is based around ‘Topiary’, digging into the history of the artform to understand how and why humans get obsessed with controlling the world around them.

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Names
Floor Kortman, Guus Kaandorp, and Lou-Lou van Staaveren

Job title
All of us are co-founders and editors-in-chief, and have a background in the arts and cultural fields. Floor is an art historian and copywriter who is more text-minded; Guus is a photographer and art director; and Lou-Lou is a photographer as well and has most hands-on gardening experience and knowledge. In reality, all of us do many jobs – whatever needs doing.

What is Pleasant Place?
Pleasant Place is a growing collection of publications about the art of gardening. It informs and inspires by offering both practical and in-depth information as well as unexpected approaches to everyday garden tasks and garden design. Through our collaborations with experts and artists, Pleasant Place caters to those who grow gardens as well as those who imagine gardens.

What makes it different from the rest?
Our more experimental and artistic approach to the garden and gardening. We believe that gardening has been undervalued as an artform and we want to promote it as such. The garden itself is a unique place that can be many things: It can be a work of art in itself, but it’s also the studio in which the process of art-making takes place, as well as the exhibition space in which the work is presented.

Who makes Pleasant Place?
The three of us, with the help of our wonderful graphic designers from fanfare, and many other contributing artists and writers.

Who reads it?
Green-minded urbanites as well as garden-lovers looking for a funky addition to the mainstream garden magazines out there.

Why do you work in magazines?
For the simple and obvious fact that we love print, and, on top of that, because we believe print and publications to be one of the most democratic and inclusive ways to share and distribute art and information.

Aside from the print magazine, what else are you involved in?
Floor is a copywriter and has just started a new job at the coolest book shop in Amsterdam, Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum. Guus is a freelance photographer, art director, and musician, and he curates Bovenkast, the smallest music venue in Amsterdam with the best city view. Lou-Lou is also a freelance photographer and visual artist whose artistic practice revolves around the desire to capture the ideal garden in images and installations.

What would you change about Pleasant Place if you could?
Ideally we’d love to be able to make some money off the project so we could spend more time on it and expand the platform.

Where do you see Pleasant Place in five years?
In five years we will have made many more publications and two binders. We will have increased our print run and we will have grown Pleasant Place into a solid art x garden platform. Pleasant Place will have a physical office with a garden space in which actual, physical garden experiments take place and where we can receive like-minded garden gnomes.