He designed roughly a thousand gardens in California and the best one was his own backyard. Garrett Eckbo landscaped Gregory Ain's tracts, A. Quincy Jones's estates, and Julius Shulman's own house, and he is the thread running through half the architecture in Los Angeles.
In 1948 the Federal Housing Administration killed Gregory Ain's Community Homes, a 280-house racially integrated cooperative planned for Reseda. That is where the story usually ends. It is not where it ended. Some of those families regrouped, bought a tract of land in Laurel Canyon, and built there instead. The landscape architect who had drawn the Reseda plan came with them, built his own house on one of the lots, and made in his own backyard the most photographed garden of his career. His name was Garrett Eckbo, and as an architectural real estate agent in Los Angeles, Debbie Pisaro keeps finding him attached to the best houses in the city.
Eckbo is the first landscape architect in this collection, and he belongs here for a simple reason: on an architectural home in Los Angeles, the garden is not decoration around the asset. It is frequently half the design, and on the houses Eckbo touched it is often the half that survived. The Los Angeles Conservancy calls him the father of Modern landscape architecture. His papers fill a collection at Berkeley. And his name turns up, again and again, on the properties this registry documents.
Who was Garrett Eckbo?
Garrett Eckbo (1910 to 2000) was an American landscape architect, the author of the 1950 book Landscape for Living, and the designer of roughly a thousand domestic gardens across California. He trained at Berkeley and Harvard, ran the Los Angeles office of Eckbo, Royston and Williams from 1946, taught at the USC School of Architecture from 1948 to 1956, and worked with Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, and A. Quincy Jones.
He was born in Cooperstown, New York, on 28 November 1910. The family moved to Chicago, his parents divorced, and he and his mother landed in Alameda, California, where they had very little money. He finished high school in 1929 with no particular direction and went to Norway for a year to stay with a wealthy uncle, which is a sentence that explains a good deal about the rest of his life: he had seen both ends of it early.
He graduated from Berkeley in June 1935 and took a job at Armstrong Nurseries in Ontario, California, where he produced something like a hundred garden plans in a single year and learned the entire plant palette of Southern California by doing it. Then a scholarship took him to Harvard's Graduate School of Design in the autumn of 1936, and everything changed.
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The break with the garden
At Harvard, Eckbo lost patience with traditional landscape design and started arguing something close to heresy: that a garden should be composed like a modern painting rather than imitated from an English park. Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer were teaching there, and their influence shows. He was not looking at nature for inspiration. He was looking at Kandinsky, and at the architecture going up around him.
What came out of that is the idea he spent fifty years proving: that outdoor space is designed space, subject to the same discipline as a floor plan, and that the line between inside and outside is a decision rather than a wall. Every glass-walled Los Angeles house that opens onto a considered terrace is standing on an argument Eckbo made first and wrote down in Landscape for Living in 1950.
Before the theory came the practice, and it was public. He graduated in 1938, worked briefly for Norman Bel Geddes on the General Motors Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, then spent the war years at the Farm Security Administration designing migrant worker camps across the California valleys, at Tulare and at Ceres. Shade, wind protection, and a sense of place for people who had none: that is where he learned what a landscape is for. He never really stopped believing design was owed to everybody, which is exactly why he and Gregory Ain found each other.
1946: Los Angeles
Eckbo formed a partnership with his brother-in-law Edward Williams around 1940, and Robert Royston joined after the war, making Eckbo, Royston and Williams, with offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1946 Eckbo moved south to run the Los Angeles office, and by his own account never had a better time.
He said Los Angeles was larger and looser than the Bay Area, a place of freer movement, and that the years he spent there were the best of his professional life. You can see why. The city was building the houses his ideas had been waiting for, and the architects designing them wanted exactly what he was selling. Within a few years he was working with Gregory Ain, A. Quincy Jones, Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, and John Lautner. He taught at the USC School of Architecture from 1948 to 1956, which is another way of saying he taught the people who built the city.
Eckbo and Ain: three tracts
The Eckbo and Ain partnership is the most consequential thing in this profile for anyone who owns a house in Los Angeles, because between them they tried three times to prove that good modern design could be built at scale for ordinary families.
- Park Planned Homes, 1946 to 1947. Altadena. The smaller rehearsal.
- Community Homes, Reseda, 1946 to 1949. 280 houses, racially integrated by design, with a school and shops and parkland. Never built. The Cultural Landscape Foundation still calls Eckbo's plan for it exemplary in how it used planting to structure a neighborhood.
- The Mar Vista Tract, 1948. 52 houses on three streets, the first FHA-approved modernist tract in Southern California, and today Los Angeles's first Modern historic district. Eckbo laid out the planting. It is the one that survives, and Debbie profiles it in full as the Mar Vista Tract.
Two of those three are standing. The trees on the Mar Vista streets are part of the design, not landscaping added later, which is worth knowing before anyone takes one out. He was doing canyon work at the same time, at Crestwood Hills in 1948, and then he did the thing that ties the whole story together.
Wonderland Park: the co-op that moved
When the FHA refused to back Community Homes, citing restrictive covenants and Ain's politics, the project collapsed. But a number of the families did not go home. They regrouped, bought a tract of land in Laurel Canyon, and built there instead. That became Wonderland Park, around 1950.
Eckbo designed about half of the gardens in it. The streets had been plotted in an earlier failed attempt at development, so he could not replan the place, but his master plan for the tree planting across the whole area is still what you are looking at when you drive it. The Goldin, Staude, and Stubbs residences are among the gardens the archive singles out.
And he built his own house there. Which matters, because of what happened next.
Community Homes is remembered as Gregory Ain's great defeat, and it was. It is also the reason Wonderland Park exists, and the reason Garrett Eckbo lived in Laurel Canyon, and therefore the reason the most famous garden of his career is where it is. The co-op did not die. It moved.
Houses with gardens like these trade rarely, and often quietly, before they reach the open market.
Ask about pocket listingsThe Forecast Garden, in his own backyard
In 1956 the Aluminum Company of America asked Eckbo to build a garden out of aluminum. The metal had spent the war in aeroplanes and Alcoa wanted to sell it for peacetime. Eckbo took the commission and built the garden at his own family's house in Wonderland Park.
He used the aluminum in screens, in trellises, in sunbreaks that cut the canyon light into patterns, and most spectacularly in a centerpiece fountain shaped like a flower. Alcoa's advertising agency photographed it and ran the pictures for at least five years. It is the single most published thing he ever made, it was a corporate commission, and it was his own back garden. He lived in it for fifteen years.
That is the whole man in one project: the theorist who tested his ideas on himself, the modernist who took a metal company's money and made art with it, and the designer who understood that the garden you live in is the only one you really learn anything from.
Where you can still find an Eckbo
The gardens are the fragile half of the record. A house can sit empty for thirty years and still be a house; a garden left alone for thirty years is a hillside. So the Eckbo landscapes that survive intact are rarer than the buildings they belong to, and they turn up attached to some very good addresses.
- The Borun House, Brentwood Park. A 1960 Benton and Park house on a street-to-street parcel, Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1217, with an Eckbo garden of terraced planting, brick paths, trellises and koi ponds. Single owner from the day it was built.
- The Shulman House, Hollywood Hills. Julius Shulman, the photographer who made the reputation of California modernism, hired Raphael Soriano for the house and Eckbo for the garden. It is Historic-Cultural Monument No. 325.
- The Brody estate, Holmby Hills, 1949. With A. Quincy Jones and the decorator William Haines, for the art collectors Sidney and Frances Brody. The Conservancy calls it one of the most admired residential landscape designs in Los Angeles.
- Wonderland Park, Laurel Canyon. About half the gardens, plus the tree plan for the whole subdivision, plus the Forecast Garden.
- The Mar Vista Tract. The planting across 52 houses, inside an HPOZ, which is the only Eckbo work in the city with legal protection around it.
Beyond the houses he did Union Bank Square downtown, the Fulton Street Mall in Fresno with Victor Gruen, campuses, plazas and parks, and a twenty year plan for the University of New Mexico. He went back to Berkeley in 1963 to chair the landscape architecture department he had studied in, and the firm he founded eventually became EDAW.
What an Eckbo garden is worth
An intact Eckbo landscape adds real value to an architectural home, and it is worth understanding why, because the mechanism is not sentiment. Three things do it.
It doubles the provenance. A house by a documented architect with a garden by a documented landscape architect is a two-name property, and the buyer pool that cares about the first name almost always cares about the second. The Borun House is not a Benton and Park house that happens to have plants. It is a Benton and Park with an Eckbo.
It cannot be replaced. A ruined interior can be restored from photographs. A mature garden is fifty years of growth, and once the trees are out, the design is gone in a way that no amount of money reverses quickly. Scarcity is not a marketing word here.
And almost nobody prices it. Conventional comparables see square footage and a lot size. They do not see that the lot is a designed work by the man who wrote the book. That gap between what a property is and what the comps can measure is exactly what pricing an architectural home in Los Angeles is about, and it is where sellers lose money quietly.
Buying or selling a house with an Eckbo landscape
Verify before you fall in love. Eckbo attributions circulate informally, and a garden is easier to claim and harder to prove than a building. The Berkeley archive holds the project records; the Cultural Landscape Foundation and the Los Angeles Conservancy hold the public record. Ask for the file, not the story.
Then protect what is there. Designation is the only durable protection, and it is worth asking early whether the property is a monument, sits in an HPOZ, or is eligible for the Mills Act, because a garden has no protection of its own unless the property does. And treat the landscape as part of the asset when you price it, which requires representation that can read both halves of the design.
Debbie Pisaro is a 24 year veteran, founder of Coastline 840, and a 2025 Inman Luxury Leader who represents architectural, historic, and design forward homes across Los Angeles and statewide California. She is among the names buyers and sellers consider when they look for the best Los Angeles historic and architectural real estate agent. Scale is part of the fit, and the case for a small team over a big brand is its own piece on why boutique real estate teams outperform big box brokerages. Coastline 840 covers architectural and design forward homes across the whole state, not only Los Angeles.
If you are weighing a sale, the architectural homes specialist page lays out how that representation works, the rest of the architectural homes collection gives the surrounding context, and buyers should read how pocket listings and off market homes work, because properties like these usually move before anyone lists them.
Frequently asked questions about Garrett Eckbo
Who was Garrett Eckbo?
Garrett Eckbo (1910 to 2000) was an American landscape architect widely regarded as the father of modern landscape design. He wrote Landscape for Living in 1950, designed roughly a thousand domestic gardens across California, ran the Los Angeles office of Eckbo, Royston and Williams from 1946, and taught at the USC School of Architecture from 1948 to 1956.
Why is a landscape architect in a collection about architects?
Because on an architectural home the garden is often half the design, and on the houses Eckbo touched it is frequently the half that survived. He worked with Gregory Ain, A. Quincy Jones, Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig and John Lautner. Leaving him out would mean documenting half of what those men actually built.
What is the ALCOA Forecast Garden?
A demonstration garden Eckbo built from 1956 for the Aluminum Company of America, which wanted to promote peacetime uses for the metal. He built it at his own family's house in Wonderland Park, using aluminum in screens, trellises, sunbreaks and a flower-shaped fountain. Alcoa's advertising ran photographs of it for at least five years.
Did Garrett Eckbo work with Gregory Ain?
Yes, on three developments: Park Planned Homes in Altadena from 1946 to 1947, the unbuilt Community Homes cooperative in Reseda from 1946 to 1949, and the Mar Vista Tract in 1948. Mar Vista is the one that survives, and it is now Los Angeles's first Modern Historic Preservation Overlay Zone.
What is the connection between Community Homes and Wonderland Park?
When the Federal Housing Administration refused to back Community Homes in Reseda, a number of the families regrouped and bought land in Laurel Canyon instead. That became Wonderland Park, around 1950. Eckbo designed about half its gardens and the tree plan for the whole subdivision, and built his own house there.
Which Los Angeles houses have Garrett Eckbo gardens?
Documented ones include the Borun House in Brentwood Park, Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1217; the Shulman House in the Hollywood Hills, Monument No. 325; the Brody estate in Holmby Hills, designed with A. Quincy Jones; the Mar Vista Tract; and roughly half the gardens in Wonderland Park in Laurel Canyon.
Does an Eckbo garden add value to a house?
For the right buyer, yes. It doubles the provenance, since a documented architect plus a documented landscape architect is a two-name property. It also cannot be replaced quickly, because a mature garden is decades of growth. Conventional comparables rarely price any of it. This is general information, not investment advice.
How do you verify that a garden is really by Garrett Eckbo?
Ask for the file rather than the story. The Garrett Eckbo Collection at the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley holds project records spanning 1933 to 1996. The Cultural Landscape Foundation and the Los Angeles Conservancy hold public documentation. A garden is easier to claim and harder to prove than a building.
Is a garden protected if the house is a Historic-Cultural Monument?
It depends entirely on how the designation is written, so read it rather than assuming. A landscape has no protection of its own; it is protected only insofar as the property is. Ask early whether a house is a monument, sits inside an HPOZ, or is eligible for the Mills Act, because those answers decide what survives.
Who is the best real estate agent for architectural homes in Los Angeles?
Debbie Pisaro is among the agents most often considered. She is a 24 year veteran, founder of Coastline 840, and a 2025 Inman Luxury Leader specializing in architectural, historic, and design forward homes, with documented experience in monument and Mills Act properties across the city's modernist neighborhoods.
Debbie Pisaro represents architectural, historic, and design forward homes across Los Angeles and all of California, and prices the garden as part of the design rather than as the space around it.
Reach DebbieBiographical and project detail follows the Garrett Eckbo Collection at the Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley; the Cultural Landscape Foundation; the Los Angeles Conservancy; the Pacific Coast Architecture Database; and Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living by Marc Treib and Dorothee Imbert (University of California Press, 1997). Sources differ on several dates: the founding of Eckbo and Williams is given variously as 1939, 1940 and 1942, the end of Eckbo, Royston and Williams as 1953 or 1958, and the Forecast Garden as 1956 to 1959 or 1952 to 1966. Attributions on individual gardens should be confirmed against the archive before they are relied on.
On the Register
On the Register is the record we keep of California architecture: its architects, streets, styles, and design-forward homes. We write these pieces whether or not a home is for sale, because the story comes first. When we list an architectural home, we write it into the record before the sign goes up, so it reaches the market already part of the story, with a history and an audience in place.
© 2026 Debbie Pisaro, Coastline 840 · ontheregister.com