Dining Outdoors by Design: Creating a Bay Area Outdoor Dining Space Worth Gathering Around Some of the best meals of the year never happen in a restaurant. They happen at home, on a long summer evening, with the table set outside, the light turning gold over the hills, and no one [...]
Backyard Staycations: Designing a Resort-Worthy Retreat at Home There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a backyard in early evening — the kind that makes you forget, for a moment, that you never left home. That feeling used to belong to vacation. Now, more of our clients want it in [...]
California Casual Landscape Designs California Casual landscape design is our signature Bay Area style: Mediterranean and native plants, relaxed gravel paths and flower borders, and low-water gardens built for year-round indoor-outdoor living. It pairs the ease of a casual garden with the polish of professional landscape architecture — elegant, welcoming, and built for [...]
Infinity-Edge Pools: A Bay Area Guide to Vanishing-Edge Pool Design There's a particular kind of magic that happens when a pool's edge simply disappears. The infinity-edge pool has long been one of our favorite features to design — not just for its visual drama, but for the way it reframes a property's [...]
Designing for Hillside & View Properties Steep slopes, dramatic grade changes, and sweeping views are often treated as obstacles to work around. At Montgomery Robbins, Inc., we treat them as the starting point for some of the most rewarding landscape design work in the Bay Area. What Makes Hillside [...]
Understanding Bay Area Planting Zones: A Guide for Homeowners If you've ever bought a plant at a local nursery and noticed a small "zone" number on the tag, you've already been introduced to one of the most useful — and most misunderstood — tools in garden planning. Planting zones tell you [...]
Color in the Landscape: How We Design for Beauty, Mood, and the Bay Area Environment Color is one of the most powerful tools in landscape architecture — and one of the most misunderstood. It’s tempting to treat a garden’s palette as a matter of personal taste: which flowers you love, which shades [...]
Designing Pathways for Bay Area Residential Landscapes photography by: Sarah Cosca The Role of Pathways in Residential Landscape Architecture In residential landscape architecture, the experience of moving through a property is just as important as the experience of gathering within it. A thoughtfully designed pathway does more than [...]
The Night Garden: Luxury Landscape Lighting Design for Bay Area Homes It’s easy to imagine a landscape only by the light of the sun. After all, that is when we see it most clearly. But some of the most memorable experiences within a landscape happen after dark, when lighting begins to shape atmosphere, [...]
Designing the Arrival Experience The entry to a home does more than create curb appeal—it establishes how the property is experienced from the moment you arrive. In residential landscape architecture, this “arrival sequence” shapes first impressions, daily routines, and how naturally a home feels connected to its surroundings. While there are many ways [...]
