“The [home] is a sanctuary, despite being a duplex on a standard lot in a regular urban grid,” Marble says. Irrigation was limited to vegetable beds that feature drought-tolerant landscaping.

For a Los Angeles home, Aoyagi used an IdealMow lawn of native grasses, and Dymondia, Juncus, and Hummingbird Sage.

“It was very important to get the integration between the garden and the house right,” Maynard says. The architects worked with Bush Projects to strike that balance, laying down concrete pavers and planting native flora that add to the home’s relaxed feel. Permanent steel awnings protect windows from glare, while retractable fabric ones by Shadefactor offer residents optional shelter when they sit outside.

For an A. Quincy Jones house in Los Angeles, architect Cory Buckner took on the restoration, while landscape designer Jay Griffith honored the architecture with understated, low-water landscaping.

Southwest: Steve Martino The red yucca, brittlebush, and prickly pear at a Palm Springs, California, home also relate to the southwestern climate. “Native plants let your garden tap into the food chain—it becomes a habitat while connecting you to the history of a place.”

At the base of Echo Mountain in Phoenix, a geometric home by Wendell Burnette opens up to the surrounding desert landscape. Photo by Dean Kaufman.

With plenty of sustainable features, the all-electric home is on track to be a net-zero building, producing as much energy as it uses, and, hopefully, to receive LEED Platinum certification.

The Desert House located in Desert Hot Springs is a steel structure designed with large expansive windows, and concrete flooring.

The landscaping appears to be based on the mullet principle: business in the front, as seen here (manicured grid lawn, with native vegetation sprouting in careful symmetry), party in the back (sunflowers and wild mountain grass growing in harmonious chaos).

TOLO Architecture worked with landscape designer Wade Graham to create a garden of native and drought-tolerant plants. The spaces between the volumes of the home—outside the master bathroom and bedroom pavilions, for example—have also been planted to create small native gardens.

Configur8 tiles provide distinctive cladding for the exterior of this modern home.

The couple asked Bryan Richards of Real Natives Landscape Design to incorporate drought-tolerant plants into the landscaping. Surrounding a table from CB2 are chairs from Design Within Reach.

FormLA Landscaping principal Cassy Aoyagi integrates drought-resistant plants into her Southern California projects.

Plants found in the surrounding landscape were used to obscure the lines between designed and natural worlds.

Begley tore out the grass between the sidewalk and the street and planted a drought-tolerant garden.

The new patio connects to a fire pit lounge area via the wood walkway. Naber worked with McCullough Landscape to fashion the cement and rock patio. Decomposed granite replaced the grass, and Naber planted succulents from her wedding alongside cacti and native plants for a more drought-tolerant landscape.

Composed of primarily steel, this prefab home has sufficient outdoor space. Photo by: Daniel Hennessy

The structure blends into the site’s informal English-style garden, complemented with native coastal plantings by landscape designer Paula Hayes. Accessed by sliding doors, a second-floor garden is filled with a bed of low-maintenance, drought-tolerant sedum.

The meticulously landscaped front yard is low maintenance and features drought tolerant plants and a sprinkler system.

Various groupings of succulents were planted to accent and obscure the home's relationship to its surrounding environment. Photo by: Daniel Hennessy

When designer Hilton Carter furnished the industrial-style Baltimore apartment and work studio he shares with his wife Fiona, their dog Charlie and two cats Zoe and Isabella, he created a wondrous indoor woodland that offers all the benefits of being outdoors without leaving home.

Drought-tolerant plants create a lovely landscape which frames the home’s classic midcentury profile.

The outdoor space has been landscaped with synthetic turf, as well as drought-tolerant plants.

Xeriscaping-drought-tolerant landscaping—was an important part of the house's resource efficiency. Instead of a typical lawn, the owners planted a meadow of native grasses and installed artificial turf, which requires no maintenance. The landscape design was a collaboration between CCS and John Greenlee, and was installed by Berkeley-based Siteworks Landscape.

“[The house] avoids the mass or heaviness of too much timber construction, so with a few hidden steel beams, it seems to float and hover over the site in a delicate way,” Jones says. Salal, a native plant to the Pacific Northwest, and fern act as the site’s groundcover.

The home has been professionally landscaped with native drought-resistant plants.

The astonishing transformation post renovation. The exterior palette consists of white stucco and Ipe wood, and the landscaping in the front yard is comprised of drought-tolerant plants, with a focus on succulents.

Garage and Cor-ten steel site fence

Heatherwick Studios designed this Abu Dhabi park to work with the challenging desert environment. Proposed structural features, such as a cracked canopy that mimics the landscape’s natural reaction to the blistering heat, are meant to provide shade and reduces evaporation. Image courtesy Heatherwick Studios.

- Taos, New Mexico Dwell Magazine : July / August 2017

The courtyard-facing side of the garage provides an overhang for a multifunctional playroom or entertainment space.

Phoenix design-build firm The Construction Zone renovated an old concrete-and-steel barn, turning it into a sleek new guesthouse with an open-plan, three-room layout. Completed for approximately $300,000, the 790-square-foot adaptive reuse project carefully preserves the character of the existing structure while upgrading it to match the modern aesthetic of the main residence.

The landscape Hayes conceived for a private garden in Santa Fe, New Mexico, exploits the desert landscape with drought-tolerant planting. “Walking in the Santa Fe hills is psychedelic. It’s a desert, and there’s all this rock and lichen. The people who live here are really great art collectors. It’s a minimalist art collection, but [they] also collect strange kinds of pottery and baskets.”

A lone saguaro marks the southwest corner of Thomas and Laura Hyland’s property, which is situated adjacent to the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. The structure’s main living volume is elevated and faced in glass, overlooking a descending pathway that leads to a pool tucked into the site.