The best residential landscape designs capitalize on our year-round temperate climate by creating "outdoor rooms." Outdoor rooms have the same qualities that indoor rooms have -- floors created by paving materials, lawns, and ground covers; walls created by outdoor screens, fences, hedges, shrubs, and trees; ceilings created by shade structures, patio covers, canopy trees, and the sky itself; furnishings and amenities, like pools, spas, fountains, seat walls, benches, fireplaces, cook centers, trellises, arbors, and patio furniture. Plantings add color, texture, shade, fragrance, and privacy. Landscape lighting adds nighttime drama and safety. Utility systems such as drainage and irrigation help to sustain these outdoor rooms. Just as indoor rooms are planned according to function, the same applies to rooms outdoors. Outdoor functions range from the utilitarian (access, storage, climate control) to leisure and creature comforts (gardening, relaxation, watching nature, and entertaining). The successful outdoor room brings together a variety of natural and man-made elements into a coherent plan based on the user's needs and tastes. A well-designed garden expands a house by providing room outside in which to relax, play, work, and entertain. Designing coherent plans for your outdoor environments is what Jeff Stone does. A good landscape or garden starts with space planning, which focuses on outdoor areas and how they relate to the house AND site. In addition to deciding the most effective uses of paving, planting, and lighting, Jeff frequently designs exterior structures and solves site problems (such as ungainly slopes or poor drainage), gives advice on siting a house and locating utilities, entries, driveways, and parking. Jeff has expertise in the selection of building materials and services and in suggesting cost-saving alternatives. The time to call a landscape architect is before plans for a new home are done or before you start removing old landscaping. Jeff Stone is trained to see ways of integrating the indoors and outdoors and to find ways of turning what were once thought of as landscape liabilities into landscape assets.