STUDIO TOUR: Fernando Caruncho

From Fernando Caruncho’s desk, he looks out across dusty wheat fields to the mountains north of Madrid that were once painted by Velázquez. Framed by the double doors of the “kiosk”—a small pavilion where the landscape designer and his team meet to discuss projects from Florida to New Zealand—is a perspective typical of Caruncho’s work over the past 40 years: restrained, sober gardens merging seamlessly with the landscape and the vast changing sky of the Sierra de Guadarrama. 

When he came to the site 20 years ago, it was this view that informed the design of the studio and its gardens—the “point of gravity,” as he describes it, around which the square, cream-colored buildings and the immaculate rows of boxwood and laurel were arranged. Now 62, Caruncho oversees a t...