Every senior living community has raised garden beds now.
A few boxes near the courtyard, some tomatoes, maybe basil. It photographs fine. It checks the box.
Then I walk the other five communities in the same market, and they all have the exact same beds. The same putting green. The same bocce court. The same fountain. All of it interchangeable.
On a tour, that’s a problem.
If your building is new and your garden looks like everyone else’s garden, what actually makes a family choose you?
So on our senior living work, we stopped designing gardens. We started designing dinners.
Here’s the difference. A garden is a place to grow tomatoes. A chef’s garden is wired into the kitchen. The residents plant the basil. The chef walks out and picks it. And on Wednesday night, it goes on the pizza from the oven twenty feet away.
Now the garden isn’t an unused piece of landscape. It gives operations programming. It’s a reason to go outside. It’s the story a salesperson tells on the tour. It’s a night on the activities calendar that families remember.
That only happens if you design it before the beds go in. A garden anyone can draw. The Wednesday night takes coordination with the chef, the operations team, and the activities director, worked out early, on paper, before a single bed gets placed.
Miss that, and you’ve spent your budget on something nobody uses.
Most landscape architects design a garden. We design the night it turns into.
- Blake