Design inspiration for outdoor spaces

Over the past two decades, Judy Kameon, the founder of the design firm Elysian Landscapes, has created some of Southern California’s most inviting outdoor spaces. She focuses primarily on residential gardens for clients like Sofia Coppola but has also completed some notable commercial commissions, including the grounds of the Parker Palm Springs, a project on which she worked closely with Jonathan Adler, who designed the hotel’s interiors. Kameon’s gardens have a casual, naturalistic feel but are marvels of precise botanical pairing, ingenious layout, and smart furniture and accessory selection.

In her new book, Gardens Are for Living (Rizzoli, $50), Kameon describes how she helps people transform outdoor spaces into enticing, highly personal living areas. The volume is divided into chapters detailing her pillars of good landscape design. In “Putting out the Welcome Mat,” for example, Kameon discusses strategies for converting traditional front lawns into unique and beautiful entryways. “Art in the Landscape” offers both practical advice for integrating sculpture and inspiring examples of how plants can be used to turn a landscape into a work of art, as shown at the home of artists Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell. more

Article from Architectural Digest, March 2014