About

A good landscape starts with a good listener.

I'm Sharon DeBell, owner and principal landscape architect at DeBell Design. I've spent more than twenty years designing landscapes across the San Francisco Bay Area: courtyards, hillside family gardens, senior living communities.

I'm a fourth-generation Bay Area native. I grew up in Redwood City, and my path started in my grandmother's garden. By twelve I'd taken my first landscape design class, and not long after I designed and built a pond in my parents' yard. Gardens came naturally, but I chose landscape architecture for a bigger reason: I wanted my work to make a difference for the environment.

My early years were in public work: community parks, waterfronts and streetscapes, where I learned to plan at a civic scale and to present ideas to a community.

Then I ran my own design-build practice, Seven Scapes. I earned my contractor's license, the fourth generation of my family to build, ran a crew, and designed and managed projects from the field. That chapter shapes every drawing I produce: I design with real costs and real construction in mind.

Since then I've designed residential gardens at firms including Arterra Landscape Architects, and led Northern California design at Farmscape, an edible-landscape firm. DeBell Design brings those years together.

Running my own studio means I choose my projects and see each one through myself, from the first conversation to the final walk-through. You work directly with me, and you steer at each step.

Off the clock you'll find me hiking the Oakland hills with an audiobook going, swimming in the Bay, or car camping, never packing up before noon. On weekends I wander open houses for inspiration. Back at my desk, there's usually a dog asleep at my feet.