That’s romantic as in movie stars and moguls hanging out in an outdoor resort and lounge in Palm Springs. Except this garden is in Sacramento, so no Hollywood types unless they’re friends of the owners. As for the glamour, well, that’s all there!
Modern desert style
breeze block
This lets breezes through, of course. But it also lets light through. During the day, it’s just ordinary light, but after the sun sets things get exotic, where the walls get painted with color, some of it shining through the holes, some bouncing off the floor and overhead structure.
desert plants
Look at the Sonoran desert. The plants aren’t just cacti. There are a lot of other things growing with them, not all bold. This lets the bold forms of the agaves, cacti and yuccas stand out. There are sparse desert-like grasses, gray sages, low succulents and yellow-flowered ground covers accenting the architectural plant forms like colors on a canvas.
style!
All the elements: plants, walls, structures, lighting add up to one heck of a gestalt style that really is more than the sum of its parts.
This will be a place to entertain, relax, sip coffee in the morning or something else in the evening… a Martini perhaps, with some appropriate Palm Springs 60’s era music playing in the background…
About the renderings
First you need to create all the materials, if they’re not in your CAD system’s library. Most of these weren’t. No breeze blocks, concrete block with this finish, desert plants, gravels, lights… If it’s not in the box, you need to construct it. Luckily you only have to construct something once and save it so the program knows what it is.
Then the two dimensional concept plan sketched out on an iPad gets transformed into a three dimensional model of the site, using data from the survey as a start and going from there. Once it’s modeled, you can walk around, fly, take pictures…
For views like this, you need lots of lights by night and two suns by day, just not at the same time – one for morning images, the other for afternoon. And no sun at night. A computer doesn’t know these things and would happily turn everything on for a bleached overexposed look.