Hungry, munching rabbits are the bane of any gardener. But for landscape architect Gregory Lombardi, the rabbits in one of his client’s gardens were a source of inspiration. On the garden gate, he added handles in the shape of stylized carrots and hinges in the shape of jumping rabbits. It was a small detail, something you might not notice at first glance. But it added a touch of joy and whimsy that helped tell the story of that particular garden and its little family of rabbits.
Telling the unique story of a place, adding special details, creating a narrative, and drawing upon a place’s natural materials, history, and surrounding landscapes are hallmarks of Lombardi’s award-winning work.
“If you see something that makes your heart jump a little bit, go with that and build on it, and that’s your story,” he says.
Founded in 1992, Gregory Lombardi Design creates beautiful outdoor spaces for both residential and institutional projects, from dreamy seaside homes on Cape Cod and the North Shore; to a modern and sleek Boca residence that found soft beauty within aesthetic simplicity; to an outdoor space at Governor’s Academy in Byfield, which features a universally accessible path, shade trees, benches, and a rain garden.
Now, the North Billerica–based firm has grown to include many talented designers, as well as offices on Cape Cod, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Part of its success comes from not limiting itself to any single style. Instead it tells landscape stories that enhance the existing surroundings and ignite inspiration and imagination with timeless design principles.
“One of my favorite words is intention,” Lombardi says. “I think every move that you make has to have intention behind it.”
For Lombardi, intention is about more than mere attention to detail. It’s about listening to clients and learning the language of a place and becoming fluent in it, from New England to Florida or anywhere else, and then communicating that language through landscape design.
“We’re trying to understand the local vernacular architecture or the local plant communities,” he says. “What makes sense there might not make sense in other parts of the country.”
Lombardi grew up in a small mill town in western Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh, where pollution and strip mines made the local river run orange and become devoid of life.
“I started to see how the environment is impacted by humans and what we were doing to it, bad stuff as well as the good stuff. And I think that probably subliminally influenced me,” he says.
He was also interested in ecology, the outdoors, plant life, architecture, interior design, decorative arts, and history. He studied art history in college with a concentration in architectural history and spent much of his junior year in Rome studying Baroque architecture. But everything changed when he saw a poster for Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Career Discovery program hanging in his college advisor’s office.
“It said, ‘Architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design,’” Lombardi remembers. Heasked, “What’s landscape architecture?”
“This changed my life, seeing that poster,” he says. He applied first to the Career Discovery program, and then to Harvard itself to study landscape architecture, and the rest is history.
Harvard not only gave Lombardi a world-class education, but brought him to New England, where he fell in love with its history and landscape.
“Not just the plant material, but the material palette,” he says. “It’s stone, it’s wood, it’s very authentic. . . . I found it was something I liked working with.”
In the years since, his firm has developed a reputation for exquisite attention to detail and a knack for understanding and highlighting what makes a place special.
“It’s not just landscape. It’s the idea of how the building connects with the story of the landscape and how the people live there and how you interact and how you experience it,” he says. “What are we asking people to understand or explore about that place, specifically, that’s different from someplace else?”
He points to one project at a music pavilion-turned-home on a seaside estate where Lombardi and the client wanted to keep the romance and eccentricity of the original site without being too grand, formal, or overly organized. Instead of using asphalt on the driveway, reclaimed granite pieces and stone pavers created an organic, almost “accidental” look. Other whimsical details lent a “sense of wonder,” like a bronze inlay compass rose embedded in the paving and shell details atop railing finials, including a crab that looked like it was scurrying away.
“It has a very organic, unplanned feel, which they really leaned into wanting to preserve on the site,” he says. “They didn’t want to tame it into being something that it wasn’t.”
Now, Lombardi is excited about his still-in-the-works plans for the firm’s “next chapter,” which will see it grow in new ways. “I can’t wait to see how it lands,” he says, “We want to keep telling our story. We want to tell more of it.”