Good "Connections" Help Turn Shanghai Expat Into Landscape Architect For Asia's Rich

(Note: This is a guest post by Hilary Flannery)

Dwight Law didnt come out to Asia because he was enraptured with the culture of the Orient Orient. It was a fluke.

Laws undergraduate days in the U.S. stretched out longer than expected. He was ready to wrap up a degree in landscape architecture from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo in 1993 when a planned study trip abroad was scrapped because of political tumult in South America. Laws extended college enrollment landed him a seat on a study trip the following year to a different part of the world: Asia. I never planned to stay, he recalled in an interview.

Yet Law changed his mind about leaving. The Kansan took a job at U.S. landscape architecture design firm Belt Collins in Singapore. When the Asia financial crisis hit in 1997, his layoff in 1998 became a career turning point. Law took the plunge as an entrepreneur, co-founding a company in the Southeast Asian financial hub that added 30 landscape architects in three years. The work kept coming as rivals squeezed by Asias economic pain closed.

His success put him on the radar of Hong Kong businessman Vincent Lo. Best known back then as a cement supplier , Lo was launching a historically flavored nightlife real estate project in Shanghai, Xintiandi, that many saw as misguided at a time when fast money was to be made in packed-in residential towers. Today, Xintiandi is a city icon visited by thousands daily that has helped turn Lo into a billionaire, ranking No. 1,118 on the 2015 Forbes Billionaires List with an estimated fortune worth $1.7 billion. Law, through his landscaping architecture help at Xintiandi, was eventually offered more work in China by Lo. That led to a life-changing decision to relocate to Shanghai.

It was the first in a career of enviable twists in China: Law has consistently found work from businesses owned by Asias richest people. Besides Lo, he has done four Shanghai projects for Malaysian billionaire Robert Kuoks Kerry Properties, as well as another commercial project in the city for trend-setting Soho China, owned by Beijing billionaires Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi. Among others, Law has also worked in China for Hong Kong billionaire Peter Woos

American landscape architect Dwight Law has build up a successful business in Shanghai.

Marco Polo Hotel chain. Lawssuccessesfor business elites has also helped him win high-profile Shanghai government projects, including the redesign of the garden at Xujiahui Church and creation of Donghu Park in front of a home of the citys famous pre-revolution city gangster Pockmark Tu.

He is comfortable designing great public places in uber-urban Shanghai, and equally at home working on a resort deep in a bamboo forest and tea terraced mountains in rural China, says U.S. architect and frequent Law collaborator Ben Wood. The two have been fortunate, Wood says, to be on a yellow brick road to fame and fortune in a country undergoing the greatest urbanization in the history of mankind.

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Good "Connections" Help Turn Shanghai Expat Into Landscape Architect For Asia's Rich