Landscape Architecture and Garden Design in San Diego & Southern California
Site-specific design shaped by place, climate, and time.
Southern California is not a single landscape. Coastal bluffs, inland valleys, historic neighborhoods, planned communities, and private estates each carry distinct environmental conditions, architectural languages, and cultural relationships to land. Meaningful landscape architecture in this region begins by understanding these differences, rather than applying a universal solution.
At LASD Studio, we work across San Diego and Southern California with a site-specific approach. Each landscape is designed in response to its location, architecture, and long-term environmental context, allowing outdoor spaces to feel grounded, coherent, and capable of evolving naturally over time.
A Regional Practice, Designed One Place at a Time
Our projects span a wide range of landscapes — from ocean-exposed coastal properties shaped by wind, salt air, and long horizons, to inland estates where water management, soil health, and land stewardship play a defining role. Rather than repeating stylistic templates, each project is approached as a living system in which architecture, ecology, and daily life are designed together.
This way of working allows landscapes to mature gracefully, support local wildlife and biodiversity, and remain meaningful across decades rather than seasons.
Design Intent as Structure
To reflect the diversity of Southern California’s landscapes, our work is organized around distinct design intents — each representing a different relationship between land, architecture, ecology, and time. These intents are not stylistic categories, but frameworks that help guide how a landscape is conceived, built, and allowed to evolve.
Coastal & Heritage Landscapes
Along the coast, where land meets ocean, landscape design must balance exposure, durability, architectural continuity, and long-term value. In areas such as La Jolla, Point Loma and Sunset Cliffs, Torrey Pines, Coronado, Del Mar, Laguna Beach, and San Clemente landscapes are often shaped around estate-scale properties and architecturally significant residences. Here, restraint, material aging, and a careful relationship with horizon and setting are central to the design process.
Beach Life & Littoral Gardens
In walkable coastal neighborhoods such as Pacific Beach (North and Crown Point), Cardiff by the Sea, Encinitas, Solana Beach, Carlsbad and Long Beach, landscapes are shaped by everyday use and relaxed patterns of living. These gardens prioritize human scale, ease of movement, and a seamless connection between indoor and outdoor spaces, supporting a more informal but no less intentional relationship with the land.
Historic & Heritage Properties
In historic districts such as Mission Hills - San Diego, landscape architecture plays a supporting role to architectural heritage and neighborhood continuity. Design decisions are guided by sensitivity, proportion, and cultural context, ensuring that new interventions strengthen the character of the place rather than compete with it.
Evolving Estate Landscapes & Ecological Restoration
Across inland and semi-rural communities such as Rancho Santa Fe, Fairbanks Ranch, Bonsall, Fallbrook, Pauma Valley, Valley Center, Carmel Valley and Santaluz, landscapes are often conceived as long-term living systems rather than finished compositions. These properties call for a deeper engagement with land stewardship, phased growth, soil regeneration, and ecological balance, where design decisions are measured in decades rather than seasons.
Within this context, ecological restoration and rewilding form an integral layer of the design process. Planting systems are structured to support biodiversity, restore soil health and water cycles, and reintroduce life into degraded or simplified environments. Rather than standing apart as a separate typology, ecological restoration is woven into the broader landscape framework, allowing estate landscapes to evolve naturally, stabilize over time, and support resilient ecosystems alongside refined human use.
This approach reflects LASD Studio’s broader research into landscapes as evolving systems rather than static compositions.
Begin with Place
Each location carries its own architectural language, environmental conditions, and rhythm of daily life. We invite you to explore the area that best reflects your property and landscape context, and to begin with a conversation grounded in place, purpose, and time.
LASD Studio — Landscape Architecture, Sustainability & Design
Where Art & Nature Evolve into Living Legacy
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Video presentation LASD Studio Philosophy - Designing Landscapes that heal, Endure and Evolve. Manifesto