Cantilever Press
Cantilever Press is an independent Australian imprint dedicated to books on landscape, architecture and design. Our belief is simple: a book about beautiful things should be a beautiful thing in its own right, given the format, paper and binding it deserves.
Designing Private Realms marks our first title, a book made to be handled, gifted, and as considered as the gardens within.
Our books
We publish books about the making of places — gardens, architecture, and the space between them. Design-led, photography-first, and produced to a standard that holds up decades after the trend that made them.
Our first title is Secret Gardens: Designing Private Realms — twenty of Australia's most private gardens, in one large-format clothbound volume, curated by Matthew Cantwell.
More titles to follow.
Secret Gardens
Established in 1994 by Matthew Cantwell, Secret Gardens is one of Australia's most respected landscape design practices, working across Australia and overseas.
Known for balancing spatial intelligence with richly layered planting, the practice explores the relationship between built form and nature — creating gardens of abundance in unconventional settings, from inner-city rooftops and courtyards to coastal cliffs and rural acreage.
With a multidisciplinary team of more than fifty, Secret Gardens covers the full arc of a garden's life: concept design and documentation through to construction, maintenance and renewal. It reflects an ethos of stewardship — gardens as living things, designed to endure, adapt and thrive.
Named in the prestigious VL50 lineup of best landscape
designers (2024), the practice has won dozens of design awards, with work published in local and international journals and two major monographs by Phaidon. Designing Private Realms is the second book from Secret Gardens – and the first from Cantilever Press.
The people
Matthew Cantwell
Founder & Creative Director, Secret Gardens
Matthew leads the creative direction across every project in the studio. He holds an Associate Diploma of Applied Science in Landscape Design and more than thirty-five years in design and construction.
His approach is driven by curiosity and experimentation — particularly around planting palettes, and the role plants play in shaping a garden's character. Challenging sites and unconventional briefs are where he's most at home. No two of his gardens are alike; each answers its own site, context and client.
Rochelle Abood
CEO & Director, Secret Gardens
Involved with Secret Gardens since its founding in 1994, Rochelle joined full-time in 2004. She brings over thirty-five years of commercial experience in marketing, business strategy and management, along with a Bachelor of Commerce, a Masters in International Business and an MBA.
She has been pivotal in developing the Secret Gardens brand, its operational structure and long-term direction — building a client and people-centred culture where high-calibre designers do their best work.
