A home is more than a house and yard. Home is a symbol for hospitality and a unique place for personal expression and wellbeing. The home landscape is a living environment where families interact with a personalized expression of nature. SPROUT collaborates with our clients to create outdoor environments that reflect distinctive personalities: cozy, elegant, exciting expansive, friendly, mysterious, playful, powerful, balanced, peaceful, amusing, intriguing, relaxing, private, comfortable, tranquil, cooling, calming, energizing, fragrant, colorful, fresh, moving, natural, soft, vibrant, reflective, welcoming; a garden can say and be so many things!
There are three givens to every landscape design:
The architecture or surrounding built forms affect the project site either by style, scale or lack thereof. It’s important to connect outdoor rooms with those inside the building as well as frame garden views from specific rooms.
The environment includes the surrounding areas as well as the site itself. Where is it sunny or shady? Where are good or bad views? How will the project fit into the community?
Finally, and most importantly, you!. What aspects of the project are most important to you? What is your lifestyle? What activities do you anticipate or want to encourage? How much maintenance are you willing to do?
There are three perspectives to every landscape design:
The first is creating a picture. A picture is a flat perspective of an arrangement of forms: what you would see in a postcard or if you took a photograph directly in front of you.
The second approach is designing spaces. Just as an architect creates rooms with ceilings, floors and walls, a landscape architect designs outdoor spaces with ceilings, floors and walls made of landscape and hardscape elements. The difference between being in a space and looking at a picture is that we are actively involved inside the perceptual field instead of outside of it.
The third and most exciting challenge is creating a dynamic rhythm in movement from space to space. This is where you create jazz, classical or folk music by moving the landscape in and out or up and down, quickly, slowly or with a crescendo through manipulating the amount of enclosure and openness of each individual space.
The choices of each individual and the impacts of each built project affects the health and wellbeing of our local and global environment. We encourage our clients to choose building techniques that minimize soil erosion and compaction; to use native plantings that require minimal spray and fertilizer; to incorporate rain gardens that filter water; to minimize water use through careful planting, irrigation design and water storage; and to select nontoxic materials that are manufactured locally to reduce each project’s carbon footprint.