Chula Vista Mid-Century Garden Design — Timeless Modern Living Outdoors. San Diego, California
A Mid-Century Modern garden in Chula Vista that celebrates simplicity, geometry, and Southern California light. Designed as a private retreat, it blends architecture, planting, and outdoor living into a timeless modernist landscape.
Reviving the spirit of mid-century modern design with clean lines, functional outdoor rooms, and California-native planting.
LASD Studio works across garden design, landscape architecture, urban design, and regional planning — rooted in San Diego and active internationally.
This project is an interpretation of Mid-Century Modernism, expressed through a balance of simple curved and straight lines, bold color contrasts, and decorative details such as retaining walls painted in sapphire blue. The design embodies the philosophical essence of the style: structured order for functionality, paired with simplicity and unpretentious arrangements.
Key elements include a large enclosed front lawn framed by planting, a spacious deck accommodating up to 20 guests, a fire pit lounge, vegetable garden, and BBQ area. Each space has its own clear function, yet they are unified in a coherent design language — tied together by the sapphire blue accents, a playful round window cut into the hedge, and a planting palette of shrubs, perennials, and groundcovers that complete the composition.
CONCEPTUAL 3D WALK-THROUGH, MID-CENTURY MODERN GARDEN
A short film of LASD Studio’s Mid-Century Modern garden in Chula Vista, featuring structured lawns, a sapphire-blue retaining wall, fire pit lounge, vegetable garden, and outdoor deck — a timeless blend of order, simplicity, and modern living.
Design Concept
The project embraces the mid-century modern ethos — simplicity, openness, and harmony with the environment. Structured geometry frames the garden while allowing for fluid transitions between indoor and outdoor living.
Patio & Pool Terrace
Concrete, stone, and minimalist detailing create an elegant pool terrace and patio that extend the home’s modernist architecture into the landscape.
Planting Palette
A mix of California natives and Mediterranean species delivers structure, seasonal variety, and drought-resilience. Textural grasses, succulents, and accent trees evoke the timeless look of modern California gardens.
Outdoor Living Spaces
Gathering areas — from a fire pit lounge to dining terraces — were designed to be versatile, serving both intimate family moments and lively social occasions.
DEFINITION OF THE DESIGN
The movement spanned from about 1933 to 1965 and included architecture as well as industrial, interior, and graphic design. Sleek, cool, clean, sophisticated, functional, colorful, mod, and curvy-those are apt words to describe mid-century modern design. This term encompasses the trends that influenced architecture and interior design in prosperous, post-war America. Elements of mid-century modern Exterior design include clean lines, muted tones, a combination of natural and manmade materials, graphic shapes, vibrant colors, and integrating indoor and outdoor motifs. Well-known landscape architects like Garrett Eckbo, Dan Kiley, and James Rose rebelled against the neo-classical design, conventions and theories of the time (20'-30s). They were influenced by modernist architectural ideals of simplicity, function, scale, and unity.
EXISTING CONDITION
PROJECT DESIGN DRAWINGS
