About the Practice

Landscape is not decoration.
It is the ground on which
everything else stands.

Terroir was founded in 2012 in Los Angeles by two people who believed that landscape architecture had drifted too far from the land itself. The name was borrowed from the language of wine — terroir, the idea that a place's soil, climate, and culture are inseparable from what grows there. It was a declaration of intent: every project would begin not with a style, but with a place.

In the early years, the firm was a design practice — two principals, a shared studio, and a conviction that the best landscapes emerge from deep observation. Projects were residential, often collaborations with architects who shared an interest in site-specific work. The Pacific Coast was the canvas: its Mediterranean climate, its native plant communities, its tension between wildness and cultivation.

Over the past decade, Terroir has grown into something more comprehensive. The firm now maintains in-house design, installation, and long-term stewardship capabilities — a deliberate decision to control the full arc of a project from first sketch to the way a garden looks five years after planting. This is unusual in the industry. Most firms design and hand off. Terroir designs, builds, and stays.

The collaborative posture has remained constant. Terroir works alongside architects, general contractors, and clients as a true partner — not a subcontractor brought in after the important decisions have been made. The best results come when landscape is considered from the beginning, when the relationship between a building and its ground is shaped together rather than resolved after the fact.

Portrait of Daniel Moran, Co-Founder and Design Principal at Terroir

Co-Founder & Design Principal

Daniel Moran

Daniel studied landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design before spending several years at a prominent Los Angeles firm, where he developed a fluency in the residential scale — the intimate negotiations between indoor and outdoor space that define Southern California living.

At Terroir, Daniel leads design and client relationships. He is the one in the room during the earliest conversations — listening to how a family uses their property, studying the way light moves across a site, understanding what an architect is trying to achieve. His work is characterized by restraint and precision: gardens that feel inevitable rather than imposed, where every material choice and planting decision serves the larger idea of the place.

"I'm drawn to the moment when a client stops seeing the landscape as separate from their home. When the garden becomes the room they didn't know they needed."

Co-Founder & Horticultural Director

Elena Voss

Elena came to landscape through botany. She studied plant ecology at UC Berkeley and spent her early career working in habitat restoration along the California coast — an experience that gave her an uncommon understanding of how plant communities establish, compete, and evolve over time.

At Terroir, Elena leads field operations and horticultural practice. She oversees installation crews, manages the firm's stewardship program, and serves as the bridge between what is drawn on paper and what actually thrives in the ground. Her expertise is in the long game — selecting plant palettes that mature gracefully, building soil systems that sustain themselves, and training the team that will care for a landscape years after the designers have moved on.

"A garden on the day it's planted is a promise. My job is to make sure we keep it."

Portrait of Elena Voss, Co-Founder and Horticultural Director at Terroir

Two founders. A growing team of designers, horticulturists, and craftspeople.
One shared conviction: the land comes first.

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