Davis Residence

Location El Paso, TX, USA | Client Private | Size 2,000 square feet | Status Completed 1996 | Tags Mixed Use and Residential, Culture and Art

After living with an English–style garden for 25 years in a dry environment, the owners of the Davis residence were ready for something different in the redesign of a portion of their residential setting. They wanted the new garden to be low maintenance with cacti, have a Mexican influence, and be visually separate from the existing garden. To accommodate the owners’ wishes, the new garden is developed as a kind of “folly” enclosed by walls within the existing English garden. This new garden of Mexican influence incorporates bright colors and various plantings of cacti.

A simple palette of concrete walls, paint, gravel, and cacti is used reinterpret a Mexican walled garden. The design is a series of boxes, gardens inside of gardens, presenting a metaphor of the house typology. Singular plantings of cacti inhabit the different garden rooms as the space contained by one box and outside of another becomes intentionally ambiguous.