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 how Northern Californians actually live outside.

Landscape architecture is always evolving, and few regions have a look as distinct — or as fluid — as Northern California’s. Over the past several years, we’ve watched the state’s casual, vibrant aesthetic merge with hard-won, low-water landscape wisdom, and the result is what we call California Casual: a style we’re embracing across our Bay Area projects as the natural next chapter for outdoor living here.

Casual Elegance: A California Staple

Soft flower borders and gravel paths, flowing grasses meet clean hardscape, strong architecture, and sublime landscape lighting. Elegant but unquestionably welcoming, the California landscape invites good times without the pressure of formality. A gravel path edged with soft plantings leads to an olive-encircled garden retreat in this California-style garden. Textures and colors combine effortlessly for a dramatic entrance. The low water bill makes this landscape all the more appealing!

A California Casual landscape reads as effortless, but every element is intentional. The hallmarks we design around:

Soft flower borders framing gravel paths (see our guide to designing pathways for Bay Area landscapes)
Flowing ornamental grasses meeting clean, structured hardscape
Strong architectural lines, softened by layered landscape lighting
Low-water plantings that still feel lush

Elegant but unquestionably welcoming, this style invites good times without the pressure of formality — like a gravel path edged in soft plantings that leads to an olive-encircled garden retreat, where texture and color combine for a dramatic, unfussy entrance. And since outdoor irrigation makes up roughly 30% of the average household’s water use nationally, and often more in drier climates like ours (per the EPA), a low-water plant palette isn’t just a design choice here — it shows up on the bill.

Mediterranean Influence

California shares a climate — mild, wet winters and long, dry summers — with only a handful of places on Earth: the Mediterranean basin itself, coastal Australia, and South Africa’s Cape region. That overlap means plants built for water-scarcity there, like olive trees, lavender, and rosemary, thrive here with almost no coaxing. Unique in form and with their own definition of beauty, these plants are helping define the new California garden style from San Francisco to Sonoma.

Native Plants

Native plants have long been a Bay Area gardening favorite, and we’re increasingly building entire designs around them as our understanding of their potential grows. Many California natives go dormant in summer — a survival trait, not a flaw — while others, like manzanita and California lilac (ceanothus), stay structural and presentable year-round. Paired with Mediterranean plantings, natives add structure, color, and a sense of place no imported palette can match. For a deeper look at what thrives where on your property, see our guide to Bay Area planting zones.

A few natives we return to again and again:

California fuchsia (Epilobium canum) — vivid red-orange color for a sunny border
Manzanita (Arctostaphylos) — sculptural, year-round structure
California lilac (Ceanothus) — spring color and pollinator appeal
Deergrass (Muhlenbergia rigens) — soft, low-water texture that pairs with almost anything

Outdoor Life

Here in California, outdoor living isn’t an amenity — it’s a lifestyle. Perhaps the greatest influence on the modern California landscape is simply our desire to inhabit it as fully as possible: from the recent surge in backyard bocce courts and outdoor entertaining spaces to the long Bay Area tradition of homegrown food and wine, the garden is part of everyday life here, not a backdrop to it. Helping clients fall in love with their own leisure time is, honestly, our favorite part of the job.