What Lila at Enchanting Valley taught me about continuity.
Here's a principle Lila drove home for me: if you want a place to feel whole, don't design the show and the venue as separate jobs. Design them as one.
Lila is the resident show at Enchanting Valley, Taman Safari Indonesia's park near Bogor, which opened in December 2024. Most studios would have been handed a finished site and asked to fill it. We were asked to masterplan the park and design the show inside it — so nothing had to be reconciled after the fact. It's a forest tale about a girl protecting a magical forest from poachers with her family and the forest spirits, made with creative director Peter Wilson and composer Elwin Hendrijanto. I designed sets and costumes.
Why one vision beats good coordination
When the park and the production are separate contracts, someone spends the whole build reconciling them — the arrival doesn't quite set up the show, the show doesn't quite pay off the site. Plan them together and that friction never exists. The path in, the first thing you see, the way the real landscape becomes part of the staging: all of it can be decided once, coherently.
Honest to its place
The centrepiece is a forest stage set built into the real landscape, designed to meet the trees without a visible seam. And the costumes — forest spirits and mythical creatures — were built for the open air: legible at distance, weatherproof, and tough enough for a stunt-and-effects show on repeat. None of it tries to overpower the forest. It tries to belong to it, because an environment that's honest to its place lands harder than one that shouts.
The takeaway is portable well beyond theme parks: coherence is cheaper to build in from the start than to bolt on at the end.
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About Patrick Larsen
Patrick Larsen is an Emmy Award–winning production designer and the founder of Studio Bound, a Singapore studio working across immersive experiences, themed attractions, live shows, ceremonies and broadcast design. In partnership with Taman Safari Indonesia, Studio Bound masterplanned the Enchanting Valley park near Bogor, where Patrick designed the sets and costumes for the resident show Lila. Over more than two decades he has designed for the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies, Olympic broadcasts, Las Vegas residencies, and resident shows across Asia and the Middle East.
