During extensive travels, Dani Alexander avers, she was “exposed to the beauty and craft of designed and vernacular landscapes across the globe.” That, together with an innate love of living things, led her to pursue a career as a landscape architect. “I developed a deep appreciation for the genius loci, or spirit, of each place,” she recounts.

Alexander founded Studio AKA in 2019. She teams with consulting designers to help clients formulate the best plan for their needs, then guides them through the design and construction phases of a project. “We set overall project principles that we return to through each stage of design, and we set the expectation that we are building a team of collaborators along the way,” she explains. “In this way, we build trust from the very beginning and hold ourselves accountable to the goals we establish at the onset.”

Alexander thinks of herself as a storyteller with a love of investigating the challenges in each project. She finds inspiration for her designs in the stories her clients share about past landscapes—places they knew as children, encountered through travel or cared for themselves. “The narratives,” she notes, “show me how to build strong connections between my clients and their newly designed landscapes—which will be theirs to steward for years to come.”

Studio AKA won Home & Design’s 2023 Grand Award for Landscape: Less Than One Acre and two 2023 Silver Awards from the Association of Professional Landscape Designers.