Numa Gardens
A quiet, image-led site that lets a Bay Area landscape architecture studio's built work speak first.
Numa Gardens is a landscape architecture studio in Los Gatos, CA, founded by KC Carlisle after studying Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley. The studio designs and builds high-end residential landscapes for clients in Northern California, with one team carrying each project from plan to installation. The project focused on presenting that work the way the studio thinks about it: calm, spare, and led by photography. The site opens with a full-screen stacked gallery of finished gardens, followed by a Design page on the studio's approach, a Works portfolio of 12 project pages across the Bay Area, a Studio page, a journal, and a simple contact page.
The design
Numa Gardens’ work is calm, considered, and beautifully photographed, so the design’s job was mostly to stay out of the way. We reduced the homepage to a small wordmark, a single menu, and a stack of full-screen garden images, with plenty of white space so each project reads like a page in a printed monograph.
Our approach
We kept the design almost silent. Black on white, a Hedvig Letters serif for headlines, condensed Roboto in the menu, and only four links: Works, Design, Studio and Contact. The homepage is a full-screen stack of garden photographs that slide over one another as you scroll. On the Works page, each project is labeled with its map coordinates instead of a caption, so the images carry the page.
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- Deep#1a1a1a
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What we built
- Monochrome studio design
- Stacked-photo homepage
- 12 project pages
- CMS-managed portfolio
- Studio & team bios
- Journal and contact page
The outcome
Visitors see the gardens before they read a word. Each of the twelve project pages pairs photography with a short written piece and a details panel for design team, status, location and category, then leads to the next project. The contact page sets expectations plainly: a limited number of projects at a time, Northern California only, and installed budgets from about $150k, so visitors can judge the fit before they write.
- Project pages
- 12
- Links in the main menu
- 4
- Team, from plan to install
- 1
