About
Chris Corbett Design is a landscape architecture and construction practice in Davis, California. It has been running since 1996.
Chris studied landscape architecture at UC Davis, spent a year of coursework in Denmark through the International Study Program, and took a master's in architecture at the University of Oregon.
Work is carried from first sketch through to construction rather than handed off. Drawing, planning and building stay one conversation, which keeps hold of both the budget and the detail.
The work keeps to a small palette and repeats it: board-formed concrete, weathering steel, gravel, and large-format paving laid with grass or gravel joints. Planting runs to ornamental grasses and lavender, massed rather than dotted, and left to move.
Water is nearly always still — a lap pool, or a channel narrow enough to step over — set where it will hold the sky. Fire sits across from it. Changes in level are taken in broad low steps rather than walls. Existing oaks stay, and the planting is built around them.
Not all of it is modern. Some of these gardens are looser and older in feel: brick underfoot, roses over a picket fence.
Projects are mostly in Yolo, Solano and Sacramento counties — Davis, Sacramento, Woodland, West Sacramento, Dixon and El Macero.
Best of Houzz Design in 2016, 2017, and 2020 through 2024. California contractor's license #248546.