Well Grounded

Happy Sunday,

I have been meaning to post about a great friend and more importantly, a great designer- Daniel Houchard, co-owner of From the Ground Up.  Daniel’s work, in contrast to other designers I’ve featured, is outdoors.  He has created some amazingly lovely environments for his clients here in Dallas, and I am excited to introduce you to his work. What I really admire about Daniel’s design work is how carefully he listens to his clients and interprets their wishes.  It makes for a very diversified portfolio of work with some common threads that run through all of his designs.  Take a walk with me through his gardens and outdoor rooms.

One of Daniel’s signatures is a winsome entrance to a garden.  His gates are always wonderfully interesting, and all designed by Daniel himself.

Here in Dallas, the cooling sound and sight of water is a feature of many gardens.  In Daniel’s gardens, he finds lovely and unique ways of featuring water in an understated but powerful way.

Here is a charming gathering of containers with water burbling within.  Very clever.  The marriage of architecture and garden design is for Daniel is very important, and it shows in all these photos.

 I love the sleek minimalism of this water feature.  The stacked stone is an architectural feature of the home and so looks perfectly at home as part of the water wall.

Daniel also does a masterful job of selecting plant material and massing it in artful ways.  He is equally at home using a traditional boxed garden structure or a more modern undulating pattern.  Not many designers are adept at both ends of the spectrum, but Daniel definitely is.

Here is another look at a water feature surrounded with a mixed border of perennials underplanting birch trees.  Full disclosure – this photo and the one above it are from my own home, which is how Daniel and I know one another.  He came onto our project very late in the game, after we had already gone through two other landscape designers.  I showed Daniel some photos of the Chelsea Flower Show in London, some pics of my garden in there, and referred him to the website of a very prominent British designer.  The end product was more lovely than my husband and I could have imagined.  Sometime I’ll post the inspiration photos I gave to Daniel and then the finished result.  I always think it’s so much fun to look at the inspiration behind a space and the final product.

Here is one of the most charming outdoor seating areas I have ever seen.  The lushness of the plantings in an around the arbor are fanstastic, as is the arbor itself, anchored by the candlelit chandelier.  I know it is magical at night.

See? I told you.  Isn’t the garden bordering it breathtaking as well?

Here is Daniel’s take on a traditional boxed garden, only executed in perennials and plants that are comfortable in the Dallas climate.  While the the structure and pattern are familiar, the use of different plant material makes this space feel fresh and new.  I also love the obelisk as a focal point.

I love the use of ferns as a swathe through the perennials.  The form and color provided an unexpected punch.  Look beyond and you’ll see another wonderful wall and gate.  It makes you wonder what loveliness may be behind it – which is the point, after all. 

For more images of Daniel’s work, please go here.  His business partner Ryan and he do an amazing job of design, but they also will install plantings per another firm’s design.  They are delightfully unstuffy about such things and incredibly good at what they do.   If you live in Dallas, I expect that you’ll hear more and more about Daniel and Ryan, and their firm, From the Ground Up.  For the rest of you, I hope that you’ll be inspired by their designs.

Kristin