Minimalist Landscape Design

Isn’t minimalist landscape design the same thing as contemporary landscape design?
It can be because it follows the same aesthetic principle of “less is more,” but in actuality it is much more than that. Minimalism goes back all the way to ancient Greece and Rome and really is all about a controlled approach to plant life cultivation that emphasizes the imposition of human order and the concepts of symmetry and geometry over the wild random patterns of nature. As such, minimalist tendencies are found in all derivative cultural landscape forms that were either once occupied by Rome or influenced by Greco-Roman principles. Consequently, you can apply this approach to landscaping to your yard if you like regardless of the style of your home or the size of your lot.

Can I do this myself?
This is not a task for the do-it-yourselfer. Minimalist landscape design requires a very precise approach to designing each element with just enough detail as to focus attention and please the senses, but never overwhelm them. At the same time, the entire yard must look like an interrelated array of separate elements conjoined by pathways and lighted corridors of interest. This requires close attention to geometry, proportion, scale, and even the grade of the land itself to pull off effectively.

What does your company focus on when creating a minimalist landscape design?
We focus on the following four elements: gardens, architectural walls, custom patios, and water elements.

Gardens
Successful minimalist garden design hinges on doing just enough with plant material but never overdoing the colors or the number of the plants themselves. This is more practical from both an aesthetic perspective and from an outdoor living. The garden becomes more of an outdoor room that can be experienced than a thing to overwhelm the eye. The trick here is to carefully select plants that will stand out as individual elements that share a common theme of interconnectedness when viewed as a whole. Spacing and geometry are much more important here than crowding lots of different plants together like a miniature jungle of greenery and color.

Architectural Walls
Masonry is every important to minimalist landscape design, and is perhaps the one element other than hedges that has survived since ancient times. Stone has always been a mainstay in building architectural walls, but it can be a very costly one. Bricks can work just as well due to the variety of brick colors and types available to masonry specialists. When we build walls, we make sure that the size of the wall, the color of the walls, and the overall geometry of any outdoor room we build works to contain, focus, and direct the flow of organic energy in the cultivated areas of the garden and the yard.

Custom Patios
Custom patios can be constructed from stone, concrete, brick, even wood to create a solid surface that supports human transit. Most important minimalist landscape design, patios help space out the plant life by occupying areas that would otherwise be filled with too much greenery and color.

Water elements
Water elements are used to highlight points of interest and to center garden outdoor rooms in minimalist landscape design. Many people often forget that the swimming pool is a water element in its own right as well and make the mistake of hiring a swimming pool company to build or remodel their pool. This will always diminish, if not outright destroy, the minimalist nature of the landscape because the pool will not “fit” the geometry and layout of the other elements of the landscape master plan.

Swimming pools should be designed by the landscaping professional just like the fountains, natural points, reflecting ponds, and infinity pools that are often used to punctuate high-end properties. This will ensure that the specifications of the pool respect the home and surrounding property and will provide the pool contractor that we bring in with a better frame of reference to work with.

Minimalist Garden Design

What characterizes minimalist garden design?
It is an approach to gardening based upon the belief that less is more. Plant materials are carefully selected. Unusual materials are often integrated into the softscape in very innovative ways. Hardscapes are used to establish strong lines and stark geometry. There is also a heavy emphasis on symmetry.

What are some of the more unique elements used in this design?
It often draws upon industrial elements such as stainless steel and glass. These elements are deliberately placed in a way as to suggest human dominion over natural forces. Contemporary art is very common in landscapes where the home itself is characterized by a very avant garde design that warrants reflection and compliment throughout the landscape. Water is also used to establish a sense of peace and tranquility. This can be in the form of a custom fountain or a reflecting pool centered within the various elements.

How popular is this garden design?
Minimalist garden design has been around for centuries. Many cultures have found that a less-is-more approach to landscaping is a great way to express certain values and traditions in a clearly recognizable way that avoids overwhelming the senses. In recent times, this approach to gardening has exploded in popularity—partly due to the popularity of contemporary landscaping design.

Does minimalist garden design only work with contemporary landscapes?
No. As we have noted here and in previous blogs, minimalism goes all the way back to Greek and Roman times. Because of this, you can find traces of minimalism in every popular European garden design style, including French Formal, Parterre, English, Italian, and Mediterranean. You also see minimalism in Japanese gardens as well. Minimalism is a philosophy, remember, not a single style. Any landscaping style can benefit from the controlled, conservative aesthetic it represents.

What are some specific benefits of minimalist garden design?
It is an ideal lifestyle compliment to young professionals who have just recently purchased their first home. It is low maintenance by nature, so the homeowner never has to worry about upkeep. Due to its cautious use of softscape elements, it also has a very clean appearance which adds attraction factor to home entertainment events. The reduced sense of clutter gives the yard a greater feeling of spaciousness that leaves plenty of room to develop other areas of interest throughout the property. Everything from swimming pool design, outdoor kitchen architecture, sports recreation areas, and courtyards can look good all year round when complimented by a garden that works more to compliment geometry, landscape design them, and activity than it does to draw attention exclusively to itself.

Are there any problems with minimalism I should be aware of?
If you are a do-it-yourselfer, minimalist garden design is definitely a problematic aesthetic that is best outsourced to a professional landscape designer. Do not be deceived into thinking minimal means easy. The phrase “less is more” is a literary oxymoron—something that appears to make no sense at face value. Many people who try to plant minimalist gardens themselves create something that looks barren or boring because they overdo the “less” part of the equation.

Such a tightrope of design can only be walked by a landscape designer who can implement minimalist garden design as one of many interrelated components of a landscape master plan. This master plan is intended to create an outdoor living space that compliments the architecture of your home and ties all of the surrounding landscape features together.

Minimalist Design

Minimalism can be found in many different types of gardens and landscapes, including formal, French, Italian, Mediterranean, and small garden design. All of these cultures share Greeks and Roman origins. These classical societies were the first to use minimalist in the ancient world for civil engineering and landscaping. Minimalism, to them, was the embodiment of their values of moderation and order.

Minimalist design in architecture and landscaping actually help the Romans condition subject peoples into liking their new lives in the empire. The linear plantings of boxwoods and poplars replaced the wild, chaotic underbrush of jungles and swamps. Topiaries shaped like predatory animals replaced the actual animals that disputed the human position at the top of the food chain.

Of course, the reasons for minimalist design changed greatly after the fall of Rome. It was no longer needed for civil and social conditioning and engineering. However, European aristocracy never lost its fascination for posterity, and sometimes out a megalomaniac desire to rebuild the Roman Empire led to a renewed passion in all things classical. While such Humpty Dumpty maneuverings never made any real political progress, but they did make way for a diversification of classical garden and landscape designs into all of the many cultural forms we are familiar with today.

Again, while none of these landscape designs have to be minimalist by nature, all of share common classical roots and can be customized to Houston landscapes with similar intentions to those of classical landowners. While we may not be fear Nature like our ancestors did, we still want to control it.

Ours obsession with controlling Nature has always been present with humanity since we made a conscious, collective decision not to stop being eaten by other animals. However, since the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th Century, we have become obsessed with controlling almost every aspect of Nature. We are no longer looking to simply control wildlife and ecosystems, but to manipulate the very laws of Nature itself. As a result, the mathematical, the scientific, and the abstract have now replaced the organic and the symbolic elements of art and spirituality.

Geometry is now even more important to minimalist design because it serves as the one link between what remains of the organic world, the architecture of the home, and the abstract realms of human thought. Unlike their classical equivalents, contemporary and modern minimalist gardens and yards do more than try to control and limit natural growth. They actively seek to replace natural elements with inorganic features like hardscapes, rocks, gravel, statuary, and outdoor art. This challenges your sense of order and reality, and it forces you to draw conclusions on an exclusively subjective basis.

Contemporary Patio

What are the advantages of a contemporary patio?
You may not have read this before, but a patio is actually less expensive than a deck. This is especially true if standard cost materials are used and no masonry walls are built around its surface.

In addition to being a money saver, a contemporary patio can be built with maintenance free materials. You can expect to get decades—not years—of perpetual enjoyment out of your new hardscapes. Another advantage is that you can have it build in any geometric shape and any size that complements your home architecture and ties it into the theme of your modern landscape. Many are actually curved with radial arcs to break up the linearity that repeats throughout a contemporary landscape.

Advantages of Patios

What about furniture for my contemporary patio?
New developments have allowed manufactures to duplicate the types of furniture that have always been used indoors. You can get everything from ottomans to chairs and dining room tables that are weather resistant. The trick is to make sure that you match the design and color of your furniture to something that will work with you home and your landscape. Ask our team for advice on this, because we know several places where you can find furnishings that will work for you on this level.

What kind of plants go well with a contemporary patio?
We prefer to use plants that are darker in color because of how they compliment the minimalism of the typical modern landscape. You see, vegetation is not the primary material that makes a contemporary yard actually work. Geometry and repetition are more important. Contemporary landscaping is all about the mind and its constant tendency to segment and create relationships out of abstract elements. Vegetation is tightly controlled and used as adjunct support to geometry and form. Around the edges of the patio, we normally plant low-level cover that would form a border of emphasis. For vertical impact, we often plant bamboo around the edges—particularly an edge that intersects with a wall. If you want vertical impact inside the patio surface itself, another thing we can do is to remove a portion of the hardscape and turn it into a planter for tall plants or even small trees.

What type of materials do you build contemporary patios with?

Real Stone
When stone is finished and polished, it is the very best material to use for building a contemporary patio. The costs are significant, however, because it is expensive to cut and finish the stone to this level of refinement. You also have to pay for higher labor rates because stone must be hand laid with careful, methodical, and deliberate attention.

Stone has the most natural outlook, most durable but also the most expensive type of patio materials. It require good skills to install because each stone greatly varies in shape and size. Additionally, mortar compound is used to adjoin these stones and settle as they dry. It is designed to wear well in high-traffic, need little maintenance and could last for decades.

Cultured Stone
Stone veneer is lighter and less expensive than real stone. It is a manufactured material that imitates real stone, but it does not have to be quarried and polished. Veneer can be cut with saws and laid out in blocks on the ground like bricks. Simple mortar is all you normally need to hold veneers together.

Concrete
Plain concrete works very well with any contemporary landscape. It suggests a sense of very stark absolutes that go hand-in-hand with the rugged Mentalism of modern outdoor landscaping.

Of course, you may want your patio to look a bit more decorative if it is right next to your house. In that case, we can either stamp or stain the color to make it appear more like finished stone.

Brick
Brick is good for smaller patios and for building hardscapes that are circular in design. There are many patterns we can create with bricks that generate radii and linear expansions of movement.

Contemporary Garden

What distinguishes a contemporary garden?
There is an emphasis on hardscape and geometry. Plant life is minimized to support a more Mentalist view of the world. Water, sculpture, art, and special materials are all carefully arranged around select plantings of vegetation to support the idea of a world where Man dominates and controls his environment.

What types of plants are to be used?
Plants that have a strong shape, texture, or color are preferred. The idea is to communicate a feeling of stark absolutes in everything we do. Some species that may be useful to this purpose include bamboo, fruitless olive, wormwood, blue fescue, and Crimson Pointe Flowering Plum.

Shrubs should be darker in color to compliment the gray and white hardscapes that are common in a contemporary garden.

Should it have water fountains?
It does not necessarily need a water fountain in the traditional sense of the term. Modern and contemporary art are by nature highly abstract. There are a number of things we can do in such a setting that using running water as a decorative element in its own right. Again, this does not require creating a typical fountain with a visible bowl or spout. A pump can be placed underground to make water emerge mysteriously out of gravel. Or, it can pour over a mirror or stainless steel back plane like an avant garde, artificial waterfall.

If the area is large enough, a small stream can be created that will cut through rocks, hardscapes, or vegetation in a geometric pathway that contributes dimensions and fluidity to the scene. Remember, the whole point of using water as a landscape element is to generate a state of mind where freedom of consciousness is conveyed through the movement, and tranquility of emotion are established through the sound.

Both attributes of water features lend themselves very well to contemporary gardens for this reason.

Does it have rocks or gravel?
Absolutely. Rock and gravel function as replacements to grass. They also help break up larger segments of the hardscape like concrete pavers or large stone blocks without giving way to the temptation to overplant vegetation in areas where portions of the hardscape have to be removed.

What we wind up with instead are sections of gravel where plants are growing out of the rocks rather than grass. There is a sense of life here, but a very controlled sense of life due to the absence of an entirely “green patch” of vegetation, per se.

Should it have art?
Yes. There are many forms of abstract art that can be integrated into a contemporary garden. Metal sculpture lends itself well to this style because it can be worked so many different ways. Mirrors can garden elements with a trick of the eye. Installing a single planting of vegetation and several mirrors can set up an illusion where the amount of visible greenery is completely relative to position and point of view.

Is masonry design part of contemporary gardens?
Yes. Many times we use bricks, concrete blocks, or cut stones to build architectural walls or planters. These structures add vertical impact when constructed within the boundaries of the garden. In cases where we are installing a contemporary hardscape and softscape as part of a courtyard, we use masonry contractors to create architectural walls around the seating area, water features, sculpture and plant life within.