Sarah Giesenhagen is the founder and creative director of The Bureau, a Sonoma- and Los Angeles-based interior design studio recognized for its work across hospitality, residential, and commercial spaces, including Intuit’s San Francisco headquarters. With Verdant Phenomena, Giesenhagen steps into a new role: host and curator of her first produced group exhibition, staged within the back garden of the home she shares with her partner, Architect John, and their daughter.

The show was not born from a curatorial thesis so much as an invitation. Giesenhagen extended an open call to more than a dozen artists and designers across the Bay Area and Los Angeles, many of them past, present, and future collaborators from her design practice, asking them to respond to the garden itself: its coneflowers and sunflowers, hellebores and pea tendrils, redwoods and fruit trees. What resulted is a collection of over 60 original works in furniture, sculpture, and object-making, unified by a palette of 50+ shades of green, natural wood tones, and browns pulled directly from the setting.

For Giesenhagen, the exhibition is an argument for paying closer attention. “I think we all need to spend more time being amazed by what’s in front of our face,” she says. “What we have around us is mind-blowing, from the very small to the larger contexts, from the pieces that will be on display to the setting. I want people to feel, even if just for a moment, an invitation for reprieve, to sit or lay down.”

At its core, Verdant Phenomena considers a simple idea: that we can plant ourselves, and our practices, wherever we happen to be. Gathering doesn’t require permission or a predetermined concept, only availability, access, and a willingness to invite others in. For Giesenhagen, the show is as much a reflection of how she works as what she’s built: relationships cultivated over time, made visible.

The following works, by artists and designers from Oakland to Los Angeles to Sebastopol and beyond, respond to this same sense of place.