Exterior Design
The architecturally driven design of outdoor rooms, outdoor kitchens, thresholds, hardscape, materiality, and exterior lighting, coordinated with the architect, the builder, and a licensed landscape architect.
Wanderluxe Interiors is a Silicon Valley-based interior design studio offering exterior design for homes across the Peninsula: Los Gatos, Saratoga, Atherton, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Hillsborough, Monte Sereno, and the broader Santa Clara County market. The work is led by Jodi Deister, who lives in Los Gatos. The studio's lane is the architectural and material side of everything outside the building envelope. Outdoor rooms, outdoor kitchens, the threshold between inside and outside, hardscape, exterior materiality, exterior lighting, and the small architecture of pool houses and outbuildings. Planting, irrigation, and grading are licensed landscape architecture scope and the studio coordinates with licensed landscape architects on that work.
What exterior design means
Exterior design is not the same as landscaping. It is the architectural and material design of every outdoor space a homeowner moves through, sits in, cooks in, or sees from the inside. It overlaps with architecture at the threshold, with landscape architecture at the planting line, and with interior design at the material palette. Wanderluxe's defensible scope:
Outdoor rooms (covered patios, loggias, pavilions, ramada structures), designed with the same discipline as an interior room.
Outdoor kitchens, designed to the NKBA Outdoor Kitchen Design Guidelines.
Fire features and hearth design.
Pool surrounds and pool decks (the architectural envelope around the water, not the pool engineering).
Thresholds and indoor-outdoor flow.
Hardscape (terraces, paths, paving, steps), coordinated with the landscape architect.
Exterior materiality and color, coordinated to the interior palette so the house reads as one design.
Exterior architectural lighting designed to IES standards and California Title 24 controls.
Pool houses, outbuildings, pergolas, shade structures, fences, and gates as small architecture.
The Bay Area indoor-outdoor tradition
Silicon Valley's design context is unusual. The dissolution of the wall between living room and garden was a regional preoccupation a century before today's lift-and-slide systems made it inexpensive. William Wurster and the Bay Region school treated the boundary between living room and garden as a designed condition. Joseph Eichler's Peninsula tracts put the atrium, post-and-beam structure, and floor-to-ceiling glass into the housing stock at scale. Sea Ranch set the regional precedent for buildings that sit into landscape rather than on it. The Peninsula's Mediterranean climate (Köppen Csb) means indoor-outdoor design pays a return roughly nine months a year, not three.
The threshold as the most consequential decision
The relationship between inside and outside is set at the threshold. Everything else follows. A garden with a generous lawn means little if the door to it is a 36 inch hinged unit set six inches above grade. A modestly sized terrace flush with the interior floor, opened by a 20 foot lift-and-slide system, reads as a room twice its actual square footage.
Four threshold decisions, in order of consequence:
The opening system. Lift-and-slide, multi-slide, pocketing slide, bifold, or French. Manufacturers commonly specified at the high end include NanaWall, LaCantina, Western Window Systems, Sky-Frame, and Vitrocsa. Selection drives structural header sizing and is coordinated with the architect at the framing-plan phase. Lead times typically run 14–24 weeks.
Floor-plane continuity. Interior finish floor flush with exterior finish hardscape, with a concealed drainage detail (linear trench drain or recessed grate) handling the water that the missing curb no longer keeps out. This is the single detail most often value-engineered out and most often regretted.
The transition zone. The covered transitional band between fully interior and fully exterior. Tadao Ando's engawa and Carlo Scarpa's threshold detailing at Castelvecchio are the textbook references.
Sightline. What you see from the kitchen island when the doors are closed and when the doors are open. A threshold detail is wasted if the framed view is parked cars or an HVAC condenser.
Christopher Alexander's Pattern 163 ("Outdoor Room") names the discipline plainly: "Build a place outdoors which has so much enclosure round it, that it takes on the feeling of a room, even though it is open to the sky." The threshold is where that room begins. Bringing the exterior designer in late means living with a threshold someone else chose.