REAL ESTATE : Peridian and Tokyo Landscape Firm Join Up to Branch Out

Almost everyone in Orange County’s large community of architects seems to be looking for work overseas now that the market for new buildings has dried up stateside.

But that works both ways in the case of Tokyo Landscape Architects. The Japanese firm has had a small office within the Irvine office of Peridian, an American landscape architecture company, for several years. They’re learning the U.S. market in partnership with Peridian, with an eye toward eventually doing business here.

Meanwhile, the relationship has paid off for Peridian with lots of work in Japan. In fact, the work in Japan has become a major source of revenue for the American company during this U.S. construction slump.

Both companies “have the same goals,” says Shinji Nakagawa, Peridian’s chief financial officer. “We want to take our companies global.”

Japanese architects have been working in the United States for years, usually brought in by the big Japanese developers who build here. But, says Nakagawa, TLA Inc. California is the first Japanese landscape architect he knows of to take a run at the U.S. market.

Peridian and Tokyo Landscape each employs about 100 people. Peridian does about $7 million worth of business a year, although in this tough year it probably won’t hit that mark, says Nakagawa.

Like most local architects, Peridian has been laying off people in the past 12 months, shedding about 15% of its work force, most of it in the Walnut Creek office in Northern California and in its San Diego office. The Irvine and Orlando, Fla., offices are stable and its Singapore office has just opened. Tokyo Landscape Architects does mostly government work in Japan, says Nakagawa. Like the TLA employees in Irvine, Peridian employees in Japan are learning the foreign market by working in TLA’s 11 offices there.

“That gives our staff the opportunity to learn their culture,” said Nakagawa. “You can’t impose your own notions of design on another culture.”