About us

A native of Los Angeles raised on the East Coast, Grace Phillips has been designing gardens since 1999. She specializes in sustainable landscaping, California-friendly gardens, exterior design, and was one of the first landscapers certified as a Santa Monica Sustainable Landscape Professional. 

She has had several gardens featured on the Green Gardens Tour, including a large sustainable courtyard at a low-income public school in Santa Monica. She especially enjoys working in collaboration with her clients, and regards designing gardens first and foremost as good listening.

One of Grace’s sustainable residential gardens was featured in Sunset Magazine.  The Simon-Perlstein Garden was featured in The New York Times: Home and Garden. 

Grace began working on interiors at her clients’ requests. Her interiors practice — which includes full house renovations, ADUs, cabanas, pool houses, and pergolas — has grown organically over time. Her redesign of the new Lucasfilm headquarters at Disney was her first foray into commercial work.

PHILOSOPHY

Grace has become more and more committed to the guiding principles of Sustainable Landscaping: creating a beautiful, inviting garden environment that is in balance with the local climate and ecosystems. Sustainable gardens require fewer resource inputs, such as fertilizer, pesticides and water. Grace also stresses low-maintenance spaces in her work, as garden maintenance is the nexus of water waste and air quality issues. By some accounts, garden maintenance machines — two-stroke and four-stroke engines as well as the exhaust from the garden maintenance trucks hopscotching across the city — are responsible for up to 25% of the particulate matter in the Los Angeles basin on any given day. In short, blowers are bad, leaf litter is good mulch! And by saving owners money on maintenance and water use, as well as on citations from cities that are increasingly intolerant of overspray and run-off, Grace's gardens end up being easier and more economical in the long run.