Diana Richards is an interior designer living and working in Brooklyn. Together with her boyfriend, Chris Miller, Diana has turned a builder's standard roof deck into a special place to hang out, and she's done it all on a budget! Nearly everything on the roof has been scavenged, recycled or reused.
Tell us about your outdoor project and how you enjoy it: Our roooftop was already a nice space when we moved in, with plenty of shade from a large tree that grows next door. We're so lucky to have an outdoor space in the city, so from watching the sky change at sunset, to harvesting and eating our own fresh herbs and vegetables with friends, we try to take advantage of it as much as possible. The garden plans were in the works from the time we moved in last fall, so it's wonderful to finally see it so green and buzzing with life.
How did you create it? The dining table, lounge chairs, and garden planters are made from palette wood that was scavenged from the streets of Red Hook. We spray-painted some cheap plastic chairs from Home Depot for table seating. The vegetable garden plan references the Square Foot Gardening method for sizing the planter boxes, creating a soil mix, and correct plant spacing. We're also trying out sub-irrigated buckets to grow tomatoes. The majority of the plants were grown from seed, started indoors in the winter under fluorescent shop lights, and the rest were starts from the nursery. We compost our kitchen scraps in a worm bin we made from instructions we found online, and use the worm castings to make compost tea. To give our space a terrestrial feel, we laid down discarded scraps of astro-turf found at a recently installed ball field on the upper west side.
Recommended store, site, product or resource? We use a compost tea home-brewing kit, available at Green Organics. It's an easy way to ensure the plants have healthy soil to grow in. The worms were purchased from the Lower East Side Ecology Center. Our starter plants, soil components, and supplements were purchased in Brooklyn at King's County Nurseries. They have tons of organic gardening supplies and great prices. A great resource for gardening with sub-irrigated planters can be found on a blog called Green Roof Growers.
(Images: Philip Ficks)
(Re-edited from a post originally published 06.29.09 - NM)
• SUBMIT YOUR OUTDOOR SPACE OR PROJECT
• MY GREAT OUTDOORS ARCHIVE
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The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Sheex Bedding
How to Make Fresh Pasta Dough in the Food Processor
i am puking out of jealousy
amazing space! my favorite new york space so far!
Fantastic! I love the astro-turf and your stacked wood/wood slice table. Everything is super rad!
Really well done!
Fabulous!!!! love love everything. Great use of space, must be so nice on a warm evening.
Can you tell us where your rug is from? I like the pattern.
I've been outside in 95 degree weather laying pavers and am commenting on the wrong post, never mind me! Eek!
Love the astroturf. And you never have to mow it!
oh man. i'm so envious, words fail me.
I love the entire space, it's well thought out. But most of all I'm loving the dinning table, any chance you can explain how you made it, it looks like a simple DIY project I would love to try... Thanks!
The table is a made from a huge 14-foot shipping palette, we used a circular saw to cut through the top and bottom decks of the palette to make the top, so it's basically left intact. The legs are comprised of 4 palette stringers, bolted inside the corners of the top. It took under 2 hours to make.
How did you make the trellis?
The trellis for the butternut squash is just an old screen door we found on the street. Screwed it into the side of the planter, then drilled holes for the twine.
How do you clean astroturf? Do you sweep it or vacuum it? Just wondering. I also wondered how comfortable it was to walk on in bare feet. Regardless of the answers, it is the perfect solution for this great space!
Nice. I'm assuming the roof pavers were already there?
I'm envious! You already have such huge leaves and buds for the squash! Mine are still teeny tiny here in Somerville MA.
I love this outdoor space too - the fact that a lot of the furniture is "found" really adds to the urban retreat feel of it. I think the fact that there's a tree overhanging it might be the best part of it though - natural green shade is a rare thing to have on a New York City rooftop.
Please tell me that this is a picture from last summer though, and that those crops are late season - it would kill me to think that our plants are so far behind...
BTW for any brooklynites who wants to try to make a pallette table, you can usually find a stack of them in the parking lot of Lowe's in Gowanas.
Another 3-yr. old post.
did you make the studiomama pallet chairs as well? kudos! i'm the process of "furnishing" a concrete backyard with no budget to spend. pallet tables, chairs, swings and potting benches are high on my to-make list.
Looks fantastic! I wish you'd given more info about how you winter things over. I'm in the same zone and have a condo terrace. One thing you might be interested in adding to your project is bokashi composting. I compost all my food scraps using this system. Makes great planting medium and takes up very little space. (Unlike worm composting, there's no worms, smaller bins and you can add as much material to it as you want!)