This Brooklyn backyard was made for entertaining with its outdoor kitchen, contemporary dining and seating areas, a fire-pit, bluestone patio, and custom horizontal planter boxes and fencing made of ipe (pronounced e-pay). The lush plantings include Japanese maples, dogwoods, ornamental grasses, trumpet vines, sweet potato vines, and a lush assortment of flowering perennials and annuals. All of the plantings contain automated low-voltage up-lighting and drip irrigation lines. The main challenges to designing this space included being aware of widely varying pockets of sun and shade and using the right plants that would do well in each scenario, providing adequate drainage in the bluestone patio, which we did by installing a zip drain that runs the length of the patio, and making planters that would be substantial enough to be able to hold mature plantings, but that wouldn’t be so heavy that they would be impossible to ever move later on. We put casters on the bottom of all the planters to help make them mobile, which turned out to be a very good thing when the client decided to make some changes to the placement of the planters after they were installed.
