t e r r e n e is a northern california landscape design studio.

t e r r e n e is the land design studio of rebecca sunter. 

rebecca is a landscape designer who crafts out-of-doors invitations for the body to drop into the genius of place, the animistic aliveness of our t e r r e n e world.

before earning her masters of landscape architecture at UC Berkeley and her training at design firms—including lutsko associates, john northmore roberts & associates, and bernard trainor’s ground studio—she worked on regenerative farms and ran a design/build operation specializing in edible and medicinal gardens. she has since taught UC berkeley’s landscape studios and hand-drafting courses, where she continues to advise on juries.

sunset magazine featured an interview with terrene about the iterative and reciprocal process of garden-making. rebecca’s designs 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 by a lake in the new england wood, and is on a perpetual hunt for swim holes and hot springs. she splits her time between the sf bay area and sonoma.

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.

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 -- 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 — 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 . . .