t e r r e n e is a san francisco bay area landscape design studio.

t e r r e n e is rebecca sunter and collaborators. 

rebecca was trained at uc berkeley’s masters of landscape architecture program and the offices of lutsko associates, john northmore roberts & associates, and bernard trainor’s ground studio. before formal design education, she lived and worked on farms and ran a garden design/build operation specializing in edible and medicinal gardens. she has taught landscape design studios, hand drafting, and regularly sits on jury reviews at uc berkeley. her design competition work and collaborations have been awarded by the national park service, van alen institute, national capital planning commission, national university of singapore, university of california, diablo garden club, and the landscape architecture foundation.

rebecca was reared in the new england wood, a mile down a dirt road from a lake, and is on a perpetual hunt for freshwater swim holes and steamy hot springs. she lives in the berkeley hills with her indoor and outdoor plant babes.

t e r r e n e approaches every garden as a love letter, written with equal parts discipline and exuberance.

t e r r e n e is stylistically dexterous, specializing in the greater gestural and spatializing moves optimizing dynamism, discovery, and delight in the lived landscape experience.

t e r r e n e integrates the regional, personal, and universal, blending presence of place with a client’s unique sensibility into a holistic living landscape. the studio mines the forces of sky and soil, flora and fauna, to amplify your own eden. here, the mythic meets the everyday. here, design is as much formal exercise as a catalyst for expanding the social life of a place—dwellers, neighbors, hawks, swallowtails, rabbits, rhizomes, and bees. the social life is the ecological life, the interactive buzz among us all. soon you’re sharing morning tea with hummingbirds, an oak’s dappled canopy presides over drowsy siesta, and the evening meal goes down with the lightshow of the setting sun.

t e r r e n e loves collaborations -- for gardens are like children, best reared by a village. co-creating with artisans, craftsfolk, horticulturists, contractors, carpenters, concretists, engineers, arborists, clients, and nature aficionados one and all makes the work sing. without the talents and skills of those good with their hands, the designs would remain mere drawings. your labor moves mountains (or at least their parts).

time is the ultimate collaborator, with which we work—into whose infinite stream we move a mound of earth here and plant some green things there . . . and watch what season upon season has to say to the living offering we put forth . . . never an inanimate object, every garden is p r o c e s s . . .