The focus of LaGuardia Design Group’s mission has always been to merge architecture and landscape through the lens of artful design and environmental science. By means of creative grading, planting native species, and stitching structures into the natural rolling contours of a space, the distinction between structure and nature appear to be one in the same. LDG specializes in restoration, preservation, creating ecosystems and biodiversity, all the while designing spaces that invite, inspire, and captivate.
LaGuardia Design Group, Landscape Architecture, is recognized nationally for their thoughtful and restorative approach to landscape design. The studio crafts sustainable, simple, enduring landscapes that support and integrate natural and built environments. On Long Island most of the work has been residential, often on land that meets ocean, bays or ponds; the studio’s interventions inevitably strengthen the intersection of land and water through wetland restoration, including meticulous plantings of native grasses, shrubs and trees. Design tends toward a modern, refined aesthetic where terraces, pathways and stairs are set into natural forms and plantings.
The partners and other studio members appreciate what they call “making space:” an unusually open-ended design process. In a distinctive, subtle way, founder Chris LaGuardia is known to question first ideas, encouraging the team to find additional design solutions. He suggests sources immediate or far-fetched, further exploration, better evolved ideas. In this sense, LaGuardia makes room for more curiosity, creativity, process and inquiry. Similarly “making space” means giving the designers time to become lifelong learners, to travel, explore and discover, to visit gardens, historic sites, landscapes, cities. In short, to create optimal conditions for designers to fulfill their lives, dreams and potential.
When Chris and Jane LaGuardia first moved to the East End, their own exploration of the area was largely on bicycles; they spent days riding through a neighborhoods, farms, woods and beaches, looking behind hedges and fences. Working as an architect in Norman Jaffe’s Bridgehampton office for a decade before founding his own landscape architecture practice in 1992, Chris has always been keenly interested in the opportunity to integrate the two disciplines and to elevate the value of landscape design following his own interest in modernism, sustainability and natural landscapes.
As the studio’s good work has been recognized, LaGuardia Design Group has expanded, with offices in Water Mill and New York City. Leadership is now a multi-generational, talented group led by Chris and his partners Ian Hanbach, Daniel Thorp and Jane LaGuardia. Work includes residential, cultural, hospitality and commercial landscapes in Manhattan, New England, Florida, and the Caribbean. Projects have been extensively published and awarded, notably by the American Society of Landscape Architects with the ASLA Award of Excellence in Residential Design.
