Innovative designs for sustainable landscapes.
Hello
I'm Victor Lombard, a landscape designer, ecological consultant, and food systems practitioner based between the Netherland and Bangkok. I work at the intersection of nature, food, and community, helping people design spaces that are productive, resilient, and alive.
But to understand what I do, it helps to know where I come from.
My Story
A Childhood Far From the Ground
I grew up in Malaysia and Thailand, moving between cities and international settings from birth to eighteen. The landscapes I knew were urban, concrete, air conditioning, the hum of tropical cities. Nature was something glimpsed through a window, not something I was part of.
My parents brought their own worlds with them: a French father and a Seychellois mother, two cultures shaped by different relationships with land, ocean, and food. Growing up as a third culture kid, never fully from one place, always carrying several, gave me an acute sensitivity to belonging, to roots, to what connects people to the places they inhabit.
What I didn't have as a child was soil under my feet. That absence became a question I couldn't stop asking.
Finding Ground
That question led me to study environmental sciences, plants, food and then to the living systems that sustain them. I studied Resilient Farming and Food Systems at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, one of the world's leading institutions in sustainable agriculture. During that time, with the help of other critical thinkers, I immersed myself in the ecological principles behind food production, nutrient cycles, human actions, and the design of regenerative landscapes.
My Master's research took me deep into nutrient circularity across food forest farms, tracing how nutrients move through systems. Later, a research internship in Vietnam placed me in the field alongside coffee farming communities, conducting data analysis and stakeholder work that grounded theory in lived agricultural reality.
Then I came back to Bangkok, where these experiences motivated me to bring them home. I've been designing permaculture rooftop gardens and farms for hotels, schools and individuals, developing urban growing projects, and facilitating workshops on food and ecology. Cities, it turns out, are where the reconnection is most needed!
Why Common Roots
The name Common Roots means two things to me.
The first is ecological: all living systems are connected through their roots — through soil, through nutrient exchange, through the invisible networks beneath the surface. A healthy landscape is one where those connections are understood and nurtured.
The second is human: wherever we come from — whatever our culture, our language, our history — we share a fundamental relationship with the land that feeds us. Reconnecting people with that relationship, whether through a rooftop garden in Bangkok or a food forest in rural France, is the work I care about most.
Common Roots exists to bring those two meanings together — through design, consultancy, education, and collaboration. It is a practice built to grow, and I'm actively looking for partners who share this vision to expand it beyond just me!