Garden

A guest bedroom, with furniture from Room & Board, overlooks the bridge above the dining courtyard. The home’s landscape architecture is by Ventura, California–based Jack Kiesel. Photo by Coral von Zumwalt.

Requirements for licensed contractors depend on the scope of work and the location of the project.

Looking out from the roof deck gives an expansive panorama of the San Francisco skyline, but a peek over the edge reveals the minimal lines of the backyard below.

Board-formed concrete planters hold species fitting for the Pacific Northwest, including conifers and moss.

Since Portland is at roughly the same latitude as Sapporo, Japan, Howells was inspired by minimalist Japanese gardens. All of the wood used in the space, including the furniture, is designed to weather to a silver-gray shade over time.

“When I come home, this is like a sanctuary. I open up the doors and sit outside and read, or work around the house,” says resident Colleen Nusinow.

Low retaining walls form a subtle barrier between the backyard and the surrounding vegetation. Mandy Graham designed the armchairs and lounges.

The dining room leads onto a terrace with a built-in concrete table and barbecue that are original to Raman and Schaffrath’s design. A pair of Hardoy butterfly chairs from Knoll are positioned by the pond.

Outside, a set of Bertoia chairs offer an appealing perch around a vintage glass-and-metal table.

A door leads out from the romantic courtyard, lush with plants. “Although we live in a big city, it doesn’t feel like it,” Kolasiński says. “The neighborhood and the nature are very relaxing and quiet.”

A thoughtfully designed garden in New York City makes way for an existing fountain by landscaping vertically around it. The water feature includes an Italian marble spout designed by Thomas Woltz.

Midwest: Hoerr Schaudt Knitting the designed spaces into the greater wilderness beyond was paramount for the ten-acre landscape Douglas Hoerr devised in northern Michigan. “The idea is once you’re there, you can’t tell what we did,” he says. Instead of building formal gardens right to the property line, Hoerr added a meadow planted with mature trees and indigenous grasses to buffer the yard. Naturalistic plantings ebb and flow around the 110-foot-long saltwater lap pool.

Pacific Northwest: 2.ink Studio Oregon wood sorrel offers ground cover. “The lushness of our native landscape is really the most captivating aspect of our region,” Beaver says. “Because we get so much rain, that can become an integral dimension of our designs.”

Large paver patios make excellent walkways.

At the Mill Valley home designed by architect Chris Deam for residents Jack and Ellen Corrigan, the view begins from the top. Sun studies of the steeply sloped site informed the choice for a standing-seam metal, diagonal ridge roof, which Chris refers to as the home’s “fifth facade”.

Faceted forms clad in ipe slats provide an unexpected theater for fun in Tiburon, California. The landscape, by James Lord and Roderick Wyllie of Surfacedesign, was created for a family with young children. A walkway of pavers arranged in braille spells out a poem by Christopher Marlowe; this element was conceived by local landscape architect Topher Delaney.

“[The kids] are engaged, using the mounds as barricades or inventing other worlds,” says Peterson.