You wouldn’t furnish your living room by buying a sofa, a rug, and a lamp on three separate weekends and hoping they get along. You’d think about scale and flow, materials and light, how the room feels when you walk in and how it works when life is happening in it. For inside your home, that thinking has a name: interior design.
So here’s a question worth sitting with: who’s doing that for the outside of your home?
For most homeowners, the answer is no one — or worse, three different people who never spoke to each other. A landscaper handled the plants. A contractor poured the patio. The patio furniture came from wherever was on sale. And the result is a backyard that’s perfectly nice and somehow never quite comes together — because no one designed it as a whole.
That’s the gap. And it has a name too: exterior design.
Outdoor rooms deserve the same eye as indoor rooms
Think about everything an interior designer considers — and then realize your outdoor spaces need every bit of it:
- Layout and flow — how you move from the kitchen to the dining area to the fire, and where people naturally gather
- Materials and palette — stone, wood, metal, and how they talk to the materials of your house
- The “furniture” — outdoor sofas, dining sets, loungers, and rugs, chosen and scaled like a designer chooses a living room
- Lighting — layered, warm, and designed for the way evenings actually unfold
- Built-ins — the outdoor kitchen, the fireplace, the bar, the seating walls — your outdoor cabinetry
- The soft layer — planting, color, texture, and how the garden frames the whole composition
An outdoor kitchen is your kitchen. A covered patio is your living room. A fire feature is your hearth. These are rooms — the most underused rooms of your house — and they deserve to be designed with the same intention as the ones with a roof over them.
Why a landscaper isn’t the same thing (and that’s okay)
This isn’t a knock on landscapers or contractors — we partner with excellent ones, and you need them. But installing plants or pouring concrete is execution, not design. The vision — the part that decides how it all looks, feels, flows, and fits your family — is a different discipline entirely.
The rare combination
This is exactly the space Orchard was built for. Haley is formally trained in both interior design and landscape architecture — the eye for beauty, materials, and flow that you’d want for the inside of your home, paired with a deep command of how outdoor spaces live, grow, and get built. Add a general contractor’s training, and you get a designer who can carry your outdoor rooms from the first sketch to a buildable, beautiful, cohesive whole.
So if you’ve already invested in making the inside of your home feel designed and intentional, ask yourself why the outside should be any different. Your backyard isn’t leftover space behind the house. It’s the rooms where summer happens, where the kids grow up, where the long dinners and the screen-free evenings live.
Those rooms deserve a designer too.
Frequently asked questions
What is an exterior designer? A designer who plans your outdoor living spaces — layout, materials, built-ins, furniture, lighting, and planting — as cohesive rooms, the way an interior designer plans the inside of your home.
How is that different from a landscaper? Landscapers and contractors execute (plants, concrete, construction). An exterior designer creates the overall vision and design they build from.
Do I really need one for my backyard? If you want your outdoor spaces to feel as intentional and put-together as the inside of your home, yes — design is what makes the difference.
Ready to give your outdoor rooms the designer they deserve? Start a project with Orchard.
