QUARRY GARDEN

Wild respite, material richness, and modern simplicity transform a typical residential yard into a quiet and meditative garden with a sunken “quarry”.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

2000 SF

2016-2020

Situated in an urban neighborhood in South Minneapolis, the Quarry Garden transforms a typical residential yard into a collection of wild garden rooms. The heart of the garden is a 25’ x 50’ sunken granite “quarry”, wrapped by a thicket of forty Whitespire birch and Eastern hemlock trees. In this quiet and meditative space, the city disappears.

The design team was asked to transform the underutilized shady back yard lawn into a Zen-like oasis. Abstract concept collages celebrating Minnesota’s geological and ecological context catalyzed the design direction, exploring how a wild landscape can be structured and experienced through a series of shifting planes, frames, and thresholds (both architectural and vegetal). The garden is organized as a continuation of the existing sequence of living rooms on the first floor of the house, transitioning from domestic to wild. The collages also tested ideas of mass and void within the garden, situating elevated wood plinths alongside granite-framed voids.

Five distinct outdoor rooms make up the Quarry Garden: the sunken quarry, the floating deck, the porch, the outdoor kitchen, and the green alley. The rooms are carefully designed to extend the experience of “living” from inside to outside, through the porch, onto the deck, and ultimately into the birch grove and down into the quarry. In addition to the garden rooms, the project includes the addition of a second-floor outdoor deck off the master bedroom above the porch. The deck and porch volume are wrapped in an architectural veil made of vertical aluminum slats that selectively frame and screen views from the inside out. Each wild garden room is distinct yet carefully integrated to create dynamic experiences throughout the day and across seasons. Thoughtful and carefully crafted details that honor the authenticity of raw natural material are used across the garden. Not a single intersection of materials or transition between spaces is left unconsidered.