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Cool Condo Landscape Designs For the Hot Summer

August 1, 2016

By: Keith Flamer

If you see green during summer months, chances are the landscaper or architect is top notch. For these condos and villas, landscaping is critical to the design—whether rooftops, courtyards, lounges, pool decks or observatories. These locales keep residents cool when its hot.

L’Atelier, Miami Beach, Florida

Landscape architect Enzo Enea’s strategic indigenous vegetation design inspires the two pool decks to create their own independent micro-climates at this luxury boutique condominium. Via an extended canopy, the deck will feature “outdoor rooms” with lush vegetation and temperature control to keep residents 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding Florida heat—right off the ocean. There’s even a hammock garden.

Oil Nut Bay, British Virgin Islands

Oil Nut Bay, the latest luxury resort in the British Virgin Islands offers hillside villas with living green roofs and natural stone walls that blend units seamlessly into the surrounding rocky landscape. Developer David V. Johnson’s environmentally-conscious philosophy, which used the landscape as an architectural template, also includes sustainable technologies, native plants, seaside pools.

The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Miami Beach

Drought tolerant native plants abound here which will sustain their natural beauty, even on live green walls and green roofs. The Meditation Garden is highlighted by a virtual tree of life—a three-story, multi-trunked Sea Grape tree—upon which all others bow in respect. The tree has Coontie Floridana plants at its base and Japanese Privet trees on its perimeter which join the Sea Grape tree high above to create a suspended canopy. This contemplative site is soothed by Fakahatchee grass as a meditative base.

Oceana Bal Harbor, Miami

Swiss landscape architect Enzo Enea works his magical green thumb again—this time designing Oceana Bal Harbour’s garden paradise of trees, reflection pools, and manicured lawns inspired by The Palace of Versailles in France. The LEED-certified luxury condo uses native plants, none of which are palm trees—ensuring minimal maintenance and maximum longevity with a backdrop of art sculptures by artist Jeff Koons.

City Tower, Brooklyn

City Tower’s 18th floor green terrace features a soothing lawn, native plants, and a living shade trellis pavilion for residents to relax high above the concrete jungle amid Brooklyn and Manhattan skyline views. Created by Weintraub Diaz Landscape Architecture, the 10,000-square-foot roof deck offers a resident gardening area for planting vegetables, herbs, perennials, and herbaceous plants of various textures and colors which bloom seasonally. The rental tower also uses a high-efficiency drip irrigation system which maximizes efficiency and minimizes water loss to evaporation.

The Grand at Sky View Parc, Flushing, Queens

In the shadow of the U.S. Open, Sky View Parc will be a feng shui-certified, six-acre private rooftop garden with hundreds of trees, planters and greenery amid a reflection pool, meditation area, a 75-foot-long pool, two tennis courts, a basketball court, running track, playground, two dogs runs and a putting green. Atop The Shops at Sky View Center (a popular shopping venue), residents of three towers (The Grand One, The Grand Two and The Grand Three) will get exclusive use of the gardens en route to inner peace.

50 West, New York

This landscaped observatory deck at 50 West, a 64-story residential tower in Manhattan’s financial district offers a unique landscaped view nearly 800 feet in the air. Curved glass views boast unobstructed views of New York Harbor, both the Hudson and East Rivers, Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island.

Louver House, Miami

Louver House, a residential development under construction in the South of Fifth neighborhood (billed as “airy and contemporary”), will provide a lush rooftop terrace with infinity pool, overgrown trellises, outdoor yoga deck, rooftop terrace, negative-edge pool, electric vehicle stations and sunken lobby gardens by artist Michele Oka Doner. The property, designed to be one with its tropical environment, is scheduled for completion in 2017.

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