Who we are.
Chaparral Studio Gardens was founded by a mother + daughter team. Together we created a landscape design studio rooted in gardens that reflect the lives that live in them, both humans and the critters that occupy the land.
As the studio has grown, we have welcomed Ariane Vielmetter to our design team. Alongside our skilled & thoughtful contractors and collaborators, we harmonize California native flora with drought-friendly exotics and natural materials to evoke both play and meditation. We are dedicated to planting sustainable landscapes con mucho amor.
As a small child, Maite moved from Bilbao, Spain to South America. It was in the lush and verdant Venezuela that her nascent fascination with nature began. In Los Angeles, she followed in her father’s footsteps and carried her own sharp sense of aesthetics and design into the role of Art Director, Creative Director, and ultimately, management of an agency.
The intricately dovetailing amalgam of mountains, beach, and desert that forms Los Angeles always provided a respite from the stresses of advertising and an inspiration for creation and play in her own garden – both a laboratory of experimentation and a constant source of awe.
Bringing together these passions, sensibilities, and skills, Maite continues to listen to and understand what thrills or what soothes people. In her turn as a Garden Designer, she is excited to help tell someone’s story in their own surroundings.
Favorite Gardening Quote:
”A garden must combine the poetic and the mysterious with a feeling of serenity and joy.” - Luis Barragán
Maite Quílez D’Amico
Bianca studied art, receiving a BFA from Otis and an MFA from CalArts. Her affinity for playing with plants, many of which are like her, native to California, led to making art installations, sculpture and paintings that incorporated flora. Later creating terrariums, floral design and gardens both big and small. With a prominent feminist agenda, hands-on-can-do attitude and a passion for sustaining a creative studio alongside the shared landscape design practice, Bianca founded Chaparral Studio in 2012. Much of the designs in Chaparral Studio are built around a California-centric sense of humor and admiration for the natural world, aka playful depictions of plants and animals.
An avid lover of outdoor adventures, be it camping or just entertaining in her home garden, she spends as much time as possible outside tending to her plants alongside her two sons and excitable dog, an Aussie named Joni Mitchell.
Bianca’s focus is in designing landscapes that serve the intimate needs & lifestyles of her clients. Whether it be ways to reflect personal memories in the selection of plants and materials or creative solutions to engage kiddos in the local wilderness. It is the specificity of each garden that serves as a unique challenge that sparks her imagination.
For more updates on Chaparral Studio follow her instagram @chaparral_studio
Favorite Gardening Quote:
“Gardening requires lots of water, most of it in the form of perspiration.” - Lou Erickson, Cartoonist
Bianca Quílez D’Amico
Ariane Vielmetter
Ariane Vielmetter has a background in art and received her BA from UCLA and MFA from CalArts. Her lifelong interest in plants and in growing her own food developed into a passionate practice during the early years of the pandemic, where she balanced her time between gardening, working from home as a bookkeeper, making drawings of the flora and fauna in her backyard, and caring for her son. Her growing enthusiasm for California native plants, building healthy soil, and creating vibrant and sustainable ecosystems motivated her to complete the Horticulture certificate program in 2023 at UCLA.
She has helped friends and family start vegetable gardens, pollinator gardens, native plant landscapes, and small wildlife ponds. Her attentiveness to the many therapeutic processes of gardening, from selecting and propagating to pruning and caring for plants, drives her desire to educate folks about the benefits of gardening as a practice. She cultivated a garden at her home in Altadena, where she grew a diverse range of native plants along with fruit trees, vegetables, medicinal and ornamental plants. She strove to create a healthy habitat for insects, birds, and humans, to improve the richness of her soil with compost and mulch, and to design a garden that was lush, resilient, and water-wise. In January of 2025, the Eaton Fire destroyed her home, garden, and neighborhood. Since then, she has been focused on restoring and remediating the soil on her property, documenting and re-homing the plants that survived the fire, and dreaming up new gardens.
Favorite Gardening Quote:
“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.”
–Sylvia Plath, Elm
