Landscape architecture · Est. 2009
GRASS.CO designs private gardens, pools and outdoor rooms for houses that deserve a landscape as considered as the architecture beside it.
The studio
A garden is the slowest thing a house will ever gain. We design for the shape it should hold at maturity — drainage before planting, canopy before furniture, and two years of seasonal visits after the trucks have gone. Everything else is patience.
184
Gardens completed since 2009
3.5
Average seasons from first walk to establishment
4.9
Client rating across 96 completed commissions
Selected work
2019 — 2026
01
Coastal escarpment, 1.4 ha
A wind-scoured cliff site where nothing survived above knee height. We built low stone terraces to hold the soil, planted only species already growing in the headland, and set the pool flush with the deck so the horizon stays unbroken from the house.
02
Inner-city courtyard, 210 m²
Four board-formed walls and one thirty-year-old olive, craned in over the roof. The gravel is raked weekly by the owners — a maintenance ritual we designed for deliberately, because a garden this small needs a reason to be walked into every day.
03
Established garden, hinterland
The brief was a pavilion. We argued for a clearing instead: existing canopy retained, a single stone hearth, deep shade-planted borders reaching to the seating edge. The room is defined by planting, not walls, so it will look better in ten years than on handover day.
Process
01
Two visits before a single line is drawn — one in morning light, one in late afternoon. We record drainage, prevailing wind, what the neighbours can see, and what is already thriving.
02
Hand plans and planting schedules, resolved with your architect rather than around them. Levels, materials and irrigation are settled together, so nothing is improvised on site.
03
Our own crews on stonework, structures and planting. One site at a time, which is slower than most quotes assume and the reason we rarely need to return to fix anything.
04
Two years of seasonal visits after handover. We prune for the shape the garden should hold at maturity, replace what the site rejects, and hand over a maintenance regime that fits your household.
Client reviews
96 commissions
“They refused the topsoil our builder had already delivered — twice. It cost us three weeks and an uncomfortable phone call. Four years on, the hedge is the only thing on the street that didn't yellow in the drought.”
★★★★★
H. Marchetti
Hillside residence, Kew
“A maintenance visit in the second winter caught root rot in the pleached limes before we saw a thing. They lifted, drained and replanted the whole run without charging us for the argument they'd won about the drainage a year earlier.”
★★★★★
D. & A. Reyes
Courtyard house, Fitzroy North
“We wanted it finished for a December party. They told us planting in December would kill half of it and offered to build the terrace first and plant in autumn. The party was on gravel. The garden survived.”
★★★★★
S. Whitlock
Coastal property, Portsea
“As the architect I've worked with plenty of landscape firms that treat the building as an obstacle. GRASS.CO read our sections properly and came back with levels that fixed a threshold detail we'd been fighting for months.”
★★★★★
J. Okafor
Practice principal, Collingwood
“The quote was the highest of four and the only one that itemised what happens after handover. Two years of seasonal visits turned out to be the part that mattered — the first summer nearly took the ferns.”
★★★★★
M. Lindqvist
Hinterland garden, Red Hill
“They moved a mature olive over a roofline for us and then spent an hour talking us out of a second one, on the grounds that the courtyard would feel crowded by year five. They were right and it cost them the sale.”
★★★★★
T. Baumann
Terrace renovation, Carlton
Enquiries
We take on a limited number of gardens each season. Send us the address and we’ll come and read the ground.
