(Living)
Mo Helmi Designs For Longevity: What Climate Resilience Looks Like In High-End Spaces
Mo Helmi redefines luxury by blending high-end aesthetics with climate-resilient design to ensure long-term environmental and artistic value.
Once upon a time, the term ‘luxury’ conjured prominent images of elaborate designs, gold trim, and unfathomable excess. Today, however, much of that has changed as priorities have shifted across the globe. What was once viewed as a luxury years ago would now seem completely exorbitant, as the new term that defines luxury is actually ‘longevity.’ People want designs that will stand the test of time, both artistically and environmentally, and this has become the true mark of high-quality spaces.
Landscape Artist and founder of Tricoastal Scapes, Mo Helmi, has firsthand experience with modern luxury and longevity. His company, Tricoastal Spaces, is a London and Los Angeles-based design studio that has worked with clients worldwide.
With a strong background and knowledge in fashion and the arts, Helmi utilizes his unique skills and experiences to create immersive sensory stimulation green spaces that not only look beautiful, but also feel functional and have an impact on the environment and biodiversity.
Luxury is No Longer About Excess; It's About Foresight
Helmi’s work challenges outdated ideas of prestige by positioning climate resilience as a marker of intelligence, taste, and long-term value. His landscapes aren’t just preoccupied with looking opulent for the sake of it; they’re designed to protect people, assets, and ecosystems in a warming, unpredictable world.
Traditional luxury emphasized control and consumption; Helmi redefines it around environmental intelligence, emotional well-being, and performance. By 2030, real estate that fails to address ecological risk will lose cultural relevance and financial value.
What Climate-Resilient Design Actually Means
● Intelligent use of native and drought-resistant planting.
● Water management systems that reduce runoff and support soil health.
● Landscapes that cool urban heat, sequester carbon, and support biodiversity — while remaining elegant and site-specific.
Helmi’s History With Greenery
Plants and gardens were always a passion and a source of inspiration for Helmi, even during his previous fifteen years spent in the fashion industry. He was always interested in wellness, sustainability, and environmental impact, so when he saw an important gap in the landscape design industry, he seized upon it. Now, he strives to create green spaces that benefit people physically and mentally, support biodiversity and the environment, without sacrificing the beauty of the design aesthetics.
Common Mistakes In High-End Projects
Several common mistakes often made in modern high-end projects include an overreliance on surface-level greening that fails under stress, mistaking visual impact for ecological value, or delaying sustainability decisions until late in the project when most leverage is lost. Longevity is not something that can be simply tacked on; it is something that must be an embedded element of the project from the get-go in order to be effective.
The Role of Designers As Risk Managers
Due to this, Helmi often sees his work as preventative, designing against future failure. Clients increasingly look to him for strategic guidance on multiple facets of design, not just aesthetic input.
He is currently working with hospitality, residential, and institutional clients to embed climate logic early in design decisions.
Cultural Reframing Of Sustainability
Sustainability in Helmi’s projects is never moralistic, but rather it is aspirational. In his work, beauty and resilience are not trade-offs, but mutually reinforcing design values. His signature style aims to make sustainability feel inevitable, not imposed.
Moving forward, Mo Helmi hopes to continue to design private and public green spaces that benefit everyone on micro and macro levels. As he surmises, “My dream is to change the widespread mindset around beautiful green spaces vs environmental impact, to where it would be seen as a win/win for human wellness, economically and environmentally.”
BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.
