San Francisco Courtyard Garden

San francisco, CA

This artful patio garden provides a sunny outdoor perch for residents in a dense and hilly city. We worked within limited space to create a refuge that drew inspiration from the seasonal cycle of the stately Persian Walnut tree in the owner’s front yard. We designed a wall of perforated, powder coated steel panels with tree and leaf motifs. These perforated screens create visual access to the neighborhood while maintaining a cozy private dining and lounging area that is accessible from the kitchen and study. The garden is paved with black stone from India. The dark color absorbs warmth from the sun, welcome to outdoor dwellers in San Francisco’s cool coastal climate.

Collaborators on this project were Boaz Mor design and construction, and Murray Sandford of Moz Designs metal fabricators.

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Charles Haertling Home Revision

Boulder, CO

K. Dakin Design won the 2018 CARE award from the Custom Builder and Remodeler Council of Denver for the reimagination of the landscape around this classic organic-modernist home designed by Charles Haertling. The landscape design is inspired by the original home and it’s materials, especially the distinct, clean lines of the architecture and the natural, stone veneer found on the house and landscape walls. The outlines of garden beds, a small patio and a water feature reiterate the home’s straight walls juxtaposed against rough, irregular stone facades and details. This sensitivity to the architecture is clearly seen in the triangular shapes balanced with curved forms.

The clients, a couple with busy lives, wanted a simple landscape with lawn for their dogs to fetch balls. The amenities they desired were a spa, vegetable beds, fire pit, and a water feature. They wanted to soften the tall, site walls with plant material. All the material, such as the discarded, stone veneer and left-over, flagstone paving was recycled into new edging around garden areas, new flagstone paths, and a water feature. The front entry walk was inspired by a walkway at Gunnar Asplund’s cemetary in Sweden. All plant material, aside from the turf, was low water, native or climate appropriate.

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Sonoma Ridge House

Sebastopol, CA

This second home outside of Sebastopol, CA is perched on a ridge with sweeping views of Bodega Bay. The stunning scale of this environment also provides challenges to creating the feeling of shelter - making the house a home. Dakin approached this project with sight lines in mind, placing a large boulder so that it anchors a “near” view from inside the home to balance vastness of the ridge and ocean beyond.

This attention to the owner’s perspective is also expressed through a layering of climate appropriate plants and California natives seen through the kitchen window. California evergreens such as camellias, silk tassels and madrones harmonize with existing sequoias, redwood groves and a wildflower meadow on site. The diversity of this climate zone is on display in this project, which also features succulents, Douglas fir and an olive grove. In addition to ocean weather, populations of gopher and deer on site made it necessary for Dakin to protect plant roots with baskets and select plant species resistant to deer.

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High Plains Flower Garden

Denver, CO

This terraced flower garden in Boulder was designed to convey the blooming liveliness of a traditional English garden for the climate of Colorado. Flowers take center stage in a garden designed so that plants are in bloom year-round. A series of patios provide ample sites for outdoor entertaining and showcase the owner’s collection of antique outdoor objects. Subterranean rain gardens and water collection systems ensure efficient drainage on this multi-level site.

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Suburban Fern Forest

Marin County, CA

K. Dakin Design transformed this shaded walkway into a lush fern garden inspired by the renowned 20th Century California landscape architect Thomas Church. This project demonstrates how small spaces can become the highlight of the garden. Although this home is located in drought-prone California, this shaded area was friendly to the plants of the forest floor, such as tree ferns and hydrangea. Dakin centered the design around Himalayan flowering dogwood, the owner’s favorite tree.

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Garden for Entertaining

Denver, CO

The owners of this modern home in Denver, Colorado wanted beautiful, drought tolerant native plants in a xeriscape front yard combined with a backyard garden perfect for entertaining. Dakin used her deep knowledge of plants to guarantee low-maintenance splendor in the front yard. Her background in art served to create a design that would showcase the owner’s collection of fascinating outdoor objects and art from around the world. Blooming, feathery native plants in front contrast with the sophistication of a backyard that accommodates both food production and outdoor living.

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Outdoor Living Room

Denver, CO

Rock walls and flagstone patio create a sheltered outdoor living room in this lush fairy garden. Graceful Japanese maples combine with soft groundcovers and the unexpected spikes of an agave. A window-well view is transformed into a painterly scene backed by a stone wall that extends into the rest of the garden. A special sump-pump enables drainage from the window well.

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Elegant Food Garden

Boulder, CO

Initially, the owners of this garden wanted food-producing beds and greenhouse relegated to the back corner of the garden. However, Dakin designed beds and sourced a greenhouse so elegant that vegetable production ended up taking center stage, showcasing beauty and abundance. Soils for the vegetable beds were sourced from urban compost from Denver, providing a productive and sustainable base for a thriving and decorative garden

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Syncline Garden

Boulder, CO

Using onsite drainage as inspiration and guidance for design, this garden of gray greens and hot-colored blossoms incorporates a sculptural fountain as well as a green roof prairie that melds with dramatic views of the syncline mountain beyond. Excess bluestone paving was turned on its side to create an undulating, sculptural rain garden planted with moisture-loving plants. Dakin created special compositions of plants and stones at ground-level window-wells: “paintings” for the home’s occupants, accentuating an architecture that brings the outside in.

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Sculpted Space

Foothills of Boulder, CO

This garden for a Midcentury home includes a berm that wraps around the house, screening the front of the home from the street and serving as seating for an amphitheater in the back, where owners host gatherings and project movies. Tufted native grasses contrast with geometric hardscape and lush moments of floral growth.

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Rattlesnake Canyon

Lyons, CO

This garden mirrored the rugged landscape of the site, located in the rain shadow of Long’s Peak. All stonework for walls and patios made use of rocks collected onsite, while native plantings mirrored the natural growth, collected and identified by Mark Fusco, Senior Horticulturist at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Striking modernist lines and climate-adapted, drought tolerant plantings pay homage to the stark beauty of the arid foothills.

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Backyard BIOdiversity

Boulder, CO

This home garden included ground-level design as well as an award-winning green roof (see Rooftop Pollinator Garden). This design turned storm water runoff on a site prone to flooding in heavy rains into an opportunity for natural water features. We worked with the landscape contractors to devise several ways for water to drain: dry wells planted with wetland and moisture-loving plants; swales that guide water away from the house; natural steel channels with blue stone cobble for water runoff. The process led us to deeper collaborations with other consultants and allowed us to consider how water runoff could add beauty to the site and benefit the landscape. A large ground-level patio, as well as a second floor patio with views of the foothills, use stone to support drainage and add natural beauty. Being native plant enthusiasts, our clients wanted to create habitat for pollinators. We worked closely with them to identify perennials, shrubs, grasses and trees that not only thrive in the Front Range ecosystem but also attract hummingbirds, butterflies and bees.

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Rock & Sky

A Geologist’s Garden

Some gardens are measured in seasons. This one is measured in eons. On a hillside in south Boulder, two geologists built a contemporary home designed by Dodd Architects. But the real story is about the rocks. For her PhD, she studied stones that are 4.5 billion years old. For years, she carried those rocks in five-gallon buckets, learning their secrets. She even kept the dust.

When it came time to design their garden, she knew what she wanted: those rocks woven into the landscape. Not as decoration. As memory. As testament to a life spent reading stones. So we built them into walls—stone walls at the front entry and back yard. We mixed her ancient rock dust into the grout, so even the spaces between stones held pieces of her story. These aren't just retaining walls. They're archives.

The site presented a fourteen-foot grade change. The front walk zigzags along natural contours, working with the slope. Large local boulders create retaining walls, with native bloomers between—even evening primrose that blooms at night.

The house abuts open space. We used native plants deer won't destroy, limited lawn to a small patch, seeded the upper area with native grasses. This garden is contemporary and ancient, wild and designed—a marriage of architecture and landscape, human time and deep time, professional passion and personal devotion.

Patio & Playhouse

A Grandmother’s Gift

Some gardens begin with a vision. This one began with love. A grandmother in Boulder dreamed of a place where her granddaughter could step into another world—one just down the stairs, where fairy tales weren't just read, but lived. Where magic grew on vines and could be tasted.

The site was narrow, tucked away, difficult to reach—the kind most would overlook. I started with what was there: an old apple tree and cherry tree. They became the garden's anchors. Around them, I wove a story in plants—Nanking cherries and berry bushes at child-height, strawberries spreading like a living carpet.

At the heart: a playhouse with a porch and miniature kitchen, where a little girl could cook with herbs picked from hanging baskets, serve berries she'd gathered herself. We planted roses to climb and eventually cover the structure, knowing that as the girl grew, the roses would grow too.

From above, the grandmother can see the whole story unfold. But down in the garden, at eye level, it becomes a world scaled for wonder. The strawberries will spread. The roses will climb higher. The apple tree will keep producing fruit, marking time in harvests. And through it all, a grandmother's gift will keep growing—not just plants, but memories.

Modern Sanctuary

This corner lot in Boulder, nestled against the open spaces of Flagstaff Mountain, was always meant to blur the boundary between home and nature. The house was pure mid-century modern—clean lines, honest materials. But years of neglect had left the garden forgotten.

When a single professional woman and her dog claimed this space, they were looking for sanctuary. On a corner lot open to two streets, privacy was essential. I preserved a stunning period-piece gate and built a tall fence, then softened it with native trees and shrubs—serviceberry, chokecherry, mountain mahogany. The line between property and wilderness became a conversation.

The boulders I placed could have tumbled from the Flatirons themselves. For the dog, there's a generous lawn for tennis balls. The rest is native grasses that need only annual mowing. Near the house, we restored a curvilinear stucco sculpture from the 1950s. On the deck facing the foothills, we built an integrated bench for morning coffee and mountain views.

The design speaks in curves—wide concrete edging lines the turf in sweeping gestures echoing 1950s optimism. Mass plantings create rhythm: pussytoes carpeting the ground, platinum sage in silvery sweeps. This is sanctuary for a busy professional—a garden that doesn't demand attention but rewards every moment you give it.

 Boiler House Garden

When my clients purchased the Boiler House in Denver's Clayton neighborhood, they bought a piece of history—7,500 square feet of industrial memory designed by Temple Hoyne Buell in 1942. Three coal-fired boilers once sent steam heat to the Denver Army Medical Depot. The original smokestack, coal silo, and fly-ash building remain—not as relics they tolerate, but elements they celebrate.

This is their second garden with me. The husband is an avid gardener and cook, so this garden is about abundance: fruit trees, extensive vegetable beds, the pleasure of eating what you grow. When they tore up the concrete parking lot, they didn't haul it away. They broke it up and reused it—for retaining walls, for paths. Industrial material repurposed for living things.

Where that parking lot once sat, there's now a sunken garden. Cosmos grow wild in gravel. A fig tree bears fruit—a Mediterranean memory thriving at high altitude. Between the garden and busy York Street, we built a large berm planted thick with native grasses and shrubs—a living wall that screens without shutting out.

In the back, an aspen forest grows in gravel, creating shady refuge in Denver summers. The wife's writing office overlooks this manufactured woodland. The concrete that once supported cars now supports flowers. Transformation is always possible. Even a boiler house can become home.