Family business legacy at Enea

A family legacy shaped by nature

When Enzo Enea was around seven or eight years old, he had an experience that would go on to have a profound impact on his life and career. He was in a garden in northern Italy with his grandfather, who built outdoor fountains for a living. “It was August, it was hot, and I was thirsty and hungry,” says Enzo, recalling this memory from over half a century ago. “My grandfather got me a peach fresh from a tree nearby. It was incredible, so sweet.” Young Enzo asked how a tree could create something so delicious and his grandfather’s reply has stayed with him ever since: “If you’re good to nature, nature will give back to you.”

That ethos has guided Enzo ever since. Today, he runs Enea, one of the world’s largest and most respected landscape architecture firms, known for its sensitive and thoughtful approach to plants, trees and spaces. The company has over 300 employees worldwide and branches in Zurich, Milan, Miami and New York, alongside its headquarters in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland. It has designed gardens and homes for institutions, including hotel resorts, corporates and museums, as well as numerous private clients around the world.

Enea didn’t always operate at this scale, however. It dates back to 1973, when Enzo’s father Francesco founded a garden-decoration business. When Enzo took over the operation 20 years later, there were still just two employees. Over the course of the subsequent three decades, however, Enzo transformed Enea, as he puts it, “from a product-based business into a project-driven one”. Now, in 2025, the company enjoys global reach and a global reputation.

Much of that transformation has happened over the past decade and, like many fast-growing family companies, Enea has experienced certain growing pains. “It’s relatively easy to have everything under control with 60 or 70 people,” says Guenda Enea, Enzo’s 28-year-old daughter, who joined the business in January, and who is sitting next to her father today in a brightly lit boardroom at the company’s headquarters. “But at 300, your employees think they work for a large organisation. They expect structure, and they look for professionalism in how the company operates. The real challenge is combining that scale with the values of a family-run business.”

From childhood memories to strategic leadership

Guenda remembers going to the company’s old headquarters every Saturday when she was a child. “It was five minutes from where we lived,” she recalls. “As a small girl, I cycled over there for lunch. My grandmother would cook food for everybody, for our clients, our employees. These gatherings were huge.” Her mother also worked for the company back then, and still does to this day. So, for Guenda, growing up, “The family company was like a fourth family member.”

Despite this feeling of affinity, she never felt pressured to join Enea. “I was very privileged,” she says. “I was free to decide what career I wanted to pursue.” She decided to study law and economics at university and followed this by taking the bar exam. However, although she gained experience at a number of different law firms, she always felt a visceral desire to join the family business. “I’m an only child, so even though there was no pressure, I felt a responsibility to at least try to explore the business firsthand,” she says.

Guenda eventually joined in January, at the age of 28, as Chief of Staff, a role with a broad remit, which she describes as a “mix of strategic and operational”. One of her responsibilities is to support her father and the executive team with the management of the business; another role is to bridge the gap between that leadership group and the rest of the employees. It’s a story that will be familiar to many family businesses. “As a company grows, management continues to make decisions, but those decisions don’t always reach the wider team,” she explains. “Communication becomes more challenging. That’s something I want to improve.”

For Enzo, managing the company at its new scale whilst remaining creative as a designer has become an increasingly tough balance to strike. “We have a talented and dedicated team of landscape architects,” he says. “As the company grows, the business side naturally becomes more complex – from operations to strategy. That brings new challenges, but also great opportunities for the team to evolve, take on new roles, and grow with the company. I think Guenda can support us with this.” At the same time, a new generation of young people is joining the company. “They have a different way of thinking,” he continues. “I’m very happy that Guenda is next to me, because I want to understand them better.”

Guenda’s introduction to the company has therefore been a much-needed breath of fresh air for him. “It calms me that she’s here, it feels like I can breathe more easily,” he says, with a smile.

“In a way, she’s my oxygen and the trees we plant are the oxygen for everyone else.” Meanwhile, Guenda feels that her relationship with her father has flourished in unexpected ways. “I really enjoy that we can connect on another level,” she says. “I always listened to what he said about the business at the dinner table. But now I can really relate.”

Navigating roles and responsibilities

It can occasionally be tricky working with a family member, Guenda notes, because it can easily become emotional and patterns from your relationship outside of work can be transplanted into the office. But generally, their working relationship is productive. Enzo spends a lot of time travelling around the world, visiting projects and clients, so he relies on Guenda’s updates about how things are going back at base. “It’s a relationship built on 100% trust,” says Guenda.

Given that Guenda has just joined the firm and Enzo only turned 60 last year, any talk of succession still feels premature. “My father is still young and full of ideas and vision,” says Guenda. “I have plenty of time to learn from him.” However, the long-term goal for both of them is long-term sustainable growth for Enea, and that means shifting certain burdens away from Enzo. This is another story that will resonate with many family business owners. “We have a company that is still quite dependent on one person at the moment,” admits Guenda.

“We need to determine if we can achieve a shift.” It’s clear that both she and her father feel the future and the legacy of Enea is more secure now that she has joined the business.

Redefining what legacy means

It’s also clear, however, that the Eneas think quite differently about legacy compared with most families. To understand this properly, one has to visit the Tree Museum, which Enzo opened in 2010 next to the company’s headquarters in Rapperswil-Jona. This unique museum is situated on 7.5 hectares of land within the grounds of Mariazell Wurmsbach Abbey. Here, members of the public can take a stroll surrounded by 100-year-old trees that were saved from being felled. In recent years, he has also added artworks, installations and sculptures to the landscape. He is especially drawn to artworks and artists that convey powerful messages about humanity’s impact on the natural world – a theme, of course, that has always been at the heart of his work as a landscape architect, which strives to unite nature, architecture, ecology and art.

“We have to work with nature and not against it: our survival depends on it,” says Enzo. “That’s why I built the Tree Museum, to raise people’s awareness and sensitivity.” Among all of his many achievements, it’s the Tree Museum that feels like Enzo’s proudest legacy. It’s also the place that encapsulates most purely the early lesson his grandfather taught him: “If you’re good to nature, nature will give back to you.”