Native plants and pollinator-attracting perennials also play a part in bringing balance and connection to a structured contemporary space. “Water features are sculptural elements in and of themselves, and I always encourage clients to put fish in their water features to create an exciting ecosystem and introduce color and life,” he says. The liveliness of nature also elevates the elegance of a simple design. Repeating a color found in an ornamental grass or flower is more personal to your landscape, and won’t be out of fashion next season. Instead, look to your planting palette for cues. While it’s sometimes fun to follow trends, the lime green and orange cushions that are so popular in modern gardens right now can easily overwhelm the design of a space. You have the option of adding color using cushions, but anytime you introduce color, it demands your attention and is going to be a focal point.” “Picking out furniture that incorporates wood is always a safe way to add warmth,” he says. When in doubt, Miller advises keeping it simple. However, adding personality without disrupting the minimalist aesthetic inherent in contemporary styling can be a challenge. “It still reads as concrete.” When the mild warmth of the colored concrete is carried through the landscape in the plants and other materials, as in the project above (co-designed by Miller and Joseph Huettl while at Huettl Landscape Architecture), the coloration of the patio fits intuitively and seems a perfect choice.Įxpress Your Personality with Artful TouchesA design comes together most fully when the focal points, furnishings, and artful touches combine for a space that is customized and connected to the owners and the surroundings. Graced by mature trees and shrubs, Keaveny added colorful ornamentals like cordyline, heather, and mini nepeta. This landscape design style can be a great fit for a property with a contemporary. The Davis Colors concrete color chart has two colors, pebble and sandstone, which provide just enough lightness to make a large concrete patio feel more inviting, yet “it’s nothing too bright,” says Miller. A two-story mid-century modern home in the Bridlemile section of Portland, Oregon, received an outdoor redo by Shannon Keaveny Landscape Design that reflects its origins. Modern landscape design is defined by clean edges and an uncluttered look. One simple solution he’s discovered is to use color, but with such subtlety that it barely reads as such. The obvious solution is to add color, but color can take you away from a modern aesthetic.” Yet as Miller points out, “the natural colors of concrete, steel, smooth stucco, and some types of stone have a cool appearance which can be uninviting if overused. For example, a simple concrete patio is more honest than is concrete that has been stamped and colored to look like flagstone. There’s an emphasis on the use of “honest” materials, which is to say they aren’t pretending to be something they are not. Either way, they're guaranteed to make even the most advanced modern minimalist drool.Bring Warmth to Your HardscapesA sterile, lifeless appearance is a common pitfall in modern design. Or you can think of them as broad, moss-covered sculptures.
Effervescent.” In other words, Keane's gardens are like meditations on impermanence. “The Buddhist understanding of the world is that what we see as hard and fast-like island mountains-is in fact forever changing. It presents a delicious gallery of 28 garden designs in all manner of themes and styles to suit the home as well as the homeowner.
“They'll point you to some Buddhist or other philosophical understanding of the world.” For a project he dubbed Dream Islands, at a residence in Stone Ridge, New York, Keane set stones in a field of moss to represent islands in the sea. “Many Japanese gardens have some intentionality beyond design, beyond form and texture and color,” Keane says. Poetry comes into play when naming the gardens. With a Western plan, you start with a master plan and work down toward the details.” In Japanese gardening, he says, “you have this rock and that tree, which has a certain curve-and you work around those two things.” “A Japanese garden is a compilation of details,” Keane says, “just the way a sculptor working in clay will make a sculpture bit by bit, understanding it as it comes into existence. His approach is informed by Japanese traditions, relying on simplicity, irregularity, and poetic symbolism. to design gardens and teach landscape architecture. CobbĪ native New Yorker, Marc Peter Keane spent 18 years in Kyoto, Japan, before returning to the U.S. For his Ocean Garden in Irvington, New York, he used white sand and carefully positioned rocks to create a coastline. One of Keane's best tricks is creative symbolism. Three gardens that I recently collaborated on are perfect examples of how a contemporary mindset can help bring a garden to an enthralling level.