The yard is a room without a ceiling

We still begin with a chair. Where someone sits at four in the afternoon tells us more than a list of rooms. The yard needs that chair, a path that behaves like a corridor, and a tree that does the work of a lamp.

A lawn that tries to be a picture usually fails the people who live on it. We break the green into places: a morning edge, a table in shade, a clear run for the eye toward whatever the land already does well. The house then opens onto those places.

When the ceiling is weather, proportion still matters. Too wide and the yard feels abandoned. Too narrow and it feels like a service path. We size it the way we size a dining room: by the people who will gather, and by the quiet that should remain when they leave.