STUDIO PHILOSOPHY
Gardens are not installed. They are cultivated — through conversation, curiosity, and an understanding of how people live in relationship with the natural world.
At PCH Design Studio, every project begins with listening. We believe the best gardens emerge from genuine collaboration between designer and client — where your tastes, your rhythms, and your sense of beauty are as essential to the design as the soil, the sun, and the plants themselves. The result is a garden that feels unmistakably yours.
We work with intention, deliberately, by hand.
Every element — the play of water, the weight of stone, the sculptural presence of a container, the form of a pool, the layered tapestry of plants — is considered against the larger composition.
The result is a garden where everything belongs.
Forty years of landscape architecture brought to bear on work that is personal in scale but ambitious in vision.
PCH Design Studio was founded on a simple belief: that a beautifully designed garden is not a luxury — it is a form of art that you live inside every day.
STUDIO BIO
With over forty years of experience as a licensed landscape architect, the founder of PCH Design Studio has shaped spaces at nearly every scale — from community master plans and commercial campuses to retail environments and multi-family housing. That breadth of experience brings something unique to residential garden design: the capacity to see the whole picture, think through complexity, and craft solutions with the precision and intentionality that larger projects demand.
PCH Design Studio represents a deliberate and personal page-turn toward work that matters most — the intimate, the artful, and the ecologically grounded. Working with a select number of clients each year, the studio offers something increasingly uncommon: a licensed landscape architect who is fully present on your project, from the first conversation to the final planting.
The studio’s process is bespoke by design. Hand-drawn plans. Collaborative process. Plants selected with ecological intention and regional honesty. For clients who value craftsmanship, appreciate the difference expertise makes, and want a garden that reflects who they are — PCH Design Studio is a unique and rare practice, crafted for you.
ABOUT CHRIS
My love for gardens began long before I knew it had a name. As a boy I spent hours in the garden alongside my father, learning without knowing I was learning — how plants behave, how a space feels when it's tended with care, how nature rewards patience and attention. That early education deepened when my uncle, a gifted landscape architect practicing in Dallas, showed me that what I loved could become a life's work.
I studied landscape architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, where I was fortunate to learn from a remarkable generation of practitioners who believed that great design lives at the intersection of art, architecture, horticulture and ecology. That conviction has never left me.
My professional life began where my instincts were already pointing — in the residential gardens of Pasadena, apprenticing under the founding partners of Eriksson Peters and Thoms. It was there I first understood the delicate balance between architectural precision and organic ceremony, and what it means to craft a garden that feels inevitable — as if it could only ever have existed in that particular place, for that particular person. Over time my work expanded into commercial, civic and large scale projects, building a depth of experience across nearly every project type a landscape architect encounters.
PCH Design Studio is my return to what started it all. After forty years I find myself drawn back to the intimate scale — to gardens that are personal, artful and alive. I started this studio because I wanted the freedom to work closely with a few clients each year, bring my full attention to every project, and design with my hands as much as my mind. This is the work I was always meant to do.