The Cultivated Outdoor

There’s something deeply grounding about a well-designed garden. This week’s featured home, with landscaping by the revered Garden Studio Design in Newport Beach, reminded me just how powerful outdoor spaces can be—not only as extensions of the home but as expressions of emotion, texture, and seasonality. In today’s garden design, we’re seeing a clear return to natural materials—stone planters, raw timber benches, gravel pathways—and an embrace of California-native plantings like olive trees, ornamental grasses, and agaves that thrive with minimal water. The balance of soft and structured has never been more important: sculptural trees meet flowing meadow-inspired layers, while curated objects such as ceramic urns or minimalist lanterns add soul to the space. Outdoor living continues to evolve beyond the patio—now it’s fire pits surrounded by lounge-worthy seating, vegetable beds framed in corten steel, and water features that whisper rather than roar. Whether wild and Mediterranean or clipped and modernist, today’s gardens feel intimate and intentional. Like interiors, they are curated, lived-in, and deeply personal. And in places like Newport Beach, where outdoor living is a way of life, these gardens become sanctuaries.