Subaru Cocoon

Subaru Cocoon appears as a curved enclosure holding an interior of fern, moss, water and shadow. Light enters in fragments, breaking the wall into a patterned veil rather than a solid defence. Up close, circular openings reveal leaves, insects and partial views, while the reflective threshold unsettles the boundary between entry and immersion. This is not enclosure or openness, but enclosure and openness mutually generating each other. Mike McMahon Studio frames the garden as a confrontation between architectural protection and ecological permeability; it argues that a boundary can shelter life by refusing complete separation.

Commissioned by Subaru UK and co-designed by Mike McMahon and Jewlsy Mathews for the 2025 RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival, the garden reinterprets the traditional walled garden through the threatened temperate rainforests of Britain and Ireland. The principal wall uses perforated K-Briq units made largely from recycled construction waste and compressed rather than fired. Their porous surfaces curve around the planting, editing sightlines, filtering light and offering cavities for insects. The visitor therefore encounters sustainability not merely as a material claim, but through partial visibility, slowed movement and heightened attention. Material economy becomes spatial generosity.

Within the enclosure, woodland species weave around raised paths, fallen timber and moist surfaces. Ferns, foxgloves, mosses and epiphytic planting evoke rainforest succession, while decaying wood becomes an active nutrient-bearing structure rather than waste. Planting occupies gaps, climbs edges and softens the wall’s disciplined geometry. As visitors cross the mirror-like water threshold and move above the planted floor, their perspective alternates between control and surrender: the garden is composed, yet appears capable of exceeding its frame. Its ecological argument operates through this tension, where management enables wildness rather than erasing it.

The furniture extends the same proposition. Two chairs and a sculptural table, made from layered recycled-paper Richlite, establish a place of pause without visual excess. Their concentrated weight contrasts with diffuse planting, asking the seated body to become still while light, water and foliage continue shifting. Five honours—including an RHS Gold Medal, Best Show Garden and the Tudor Rose Award—recognised its construction and environmental ambition. Its planned adaptation for Horatio’s Garden further reframes the temporary show garden as therapeutic infrastructure. Yet its significance rests in accountability: recycled content, demountability and ecological benefit must remain verifiable beyond spectacle. At the threshold, that proposition stays tangible in the thin line where dark water meets the perforated wall.