Does Your Landscape Need a Little ‘Cosmic Latte’?

A neutral color palette creates a calm and stylish environment in our homes and provides a harmonious backdrop for furniture and decorations. Can the neutrality of beige and its various cousins do the same in garden design, allowing us to create a compelling landscape and backdrop for plantings and garden furniture?

Astronomers have discovered that the real color of the universe is beige, or “cosmic latte,” as they’ve dubbed it. If the universe is beige, what’s wrong with having a beige garden? Let’s look at a few examples of how beige can be far from bland and can, in fact, be a great building block for contemporary gardens.

Concrete is often a contemporary garden’s main source of beige. Its industrial look suits minimalist designs, in which shape and mass take precedence over color and pattern. In this landscape, shadows and tonal variations on the differing planes of the structure create interest as the light changes throughout the day.

Beige can help emphasize clean lines in a landscape’s design. The lack of bright color or decoration really allows the structure of the design to show through, even in the simplest patios.

The restriction of color in this patio allows the creamy-smooth texture of the paved walkway, the dark taupe of the canopy and the lines of the cobbles to shine through. In the same way that beige is used in interior design as a backdrop to brightly colored furnishings, here the beige enables the bright red garden furniture to pop in the design.

One definition of bland is “lacking strong features or characteristics.” Yet here the beige, which some would call the blandest of colors, emphasizes the striking lines of this design. As we’ve seen, strong modernist design has no need for color or decoration to succeed. Beige allows the wall shapes, sizes and textures to show clearly.

Continue reading Does Your Landscape Need a Little ‘Cosmic Latte’?

Does Your Landscape Need a Little ‘Cosmic Latte’?