Does Your Landscape Need a Little ‘Cosmic Latte’?

A neutral color palette creates a calm and stylish environment in our homes and provides a harmonious backdrop for furniture and decorations. Can the neutrality of beige and its various cousins do the same in garden design, allowing us to create a compelling landscape and backdrop for plantings and garden furniture?

Astronomers have discovered that the real color of the universe is beige, or “cosmic latte,” as they’ve dubbed it. If the universe is beige, what’s wrong with having a beige garden? Let’s look at a few examples of how beige can be far from bland and can, in fact, be a great building block for contemporary gardens.

Concrete is often a contemporary garden’s main source of beige. Its industrial look suits minimalist designs, in which shape and mass take precedence over color and pattern. In this landscape, shadows and tonal variations on the differing planes of the structure create interest as the light changes throughout the day.


Beige can help emphasize clean lines in a landscape’s design. The lack of bright color or decoration really allows the structure of the design to show through, even in the simplest patios.

The restriction of color in this patio allows the creamy-smooth texture of the paved walkway, the dark taupe of the canopy and the lines of the cobbles to shine through. In the same way that beige is used in interior design as a backdrop to brightly colored furnishings, here the beige enables the bright red garden furniture to pop in the design.


One definition of bland is “lacking strong features or characteristics.” Yet here the beige, which some would call the blandest of colors, emphasizes the striking lines of this design. As we’ve seen, strong modernist design has no need for color or decoration to succeed. Beige allows the wall shapes, sizes and textures to show clearly.


This meticulously crafted concrete staircase provides the perfect neutral beige background for the simple planting in front. The texture and variation in the concrete walls add interest, while the glass balustrade has a subtle graduation of color, as it covers some of the concrete while allowing light through to the stairway. It all creates an interesting feature, far from bland, without the use of bright colors or ornamentation.


The repeated plantings of soft rush (Juncus effusus) alongside this walkway and steps are brought to the fore because they’re set against beige concrete panels. The neutral color provides a blank canvas to plant against — so much better than the browns of traditional fencing or the terra-cotta color of brick walls.

It is worth remembering that green is generally considered a neutral color in garden design, so it is no wonder that it combines so well with beige.


In designs where more plantings are used, any thought of blandness from beige goes out the window. The tones in the coloring of the tall, creamy stone wall and the brighter ivory coloring of the large floating slabs over the water feature set a great skeleton upon which the formal planting can hang.

Gray, the great companion of beige in the neutrality league, completes this calm and composed landscape.


This entry is a celebration of the beige family and shows all the ways these colors and tones can be winners in the garden, from the sandy-colored walls to the dark buff of the formal pool. Not only do the tones create a calm and restful setting, but they are also the perfect companion for all sorts of natural elements, from the purple ground cover creeping over the blush-pink concrete slabs to the clear water reflecting in the raised, formal pond.


You don’t have to use just one member of the beige family. From muted cream to almost khaki, these wall panels seem to echo interior wall stripes in creating a decorative yet neutral-colored boundary.


Have I convinced you that beige and its colleagues can be anything but bland? When used with skill, these neutral colors give us great building blocks for our garden design and help create a wonderful theater in which to display a wide variety of plant material. We see in this stunning example how rust-colored boulders blend seamlessly with the beige hardscape and the skillful plantings surrounding them.


Finally, I just love this celebration of the beige family, from the ivory dining set and sand-colored seating to the crisp, clean paving. Bland? I don’t think so.

More: Modern Garden Designs for Modern Homes

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