KKLA was founded with the belief that all landscapes can achieve more than just aesthetic and recreational goals. Focused on creating productive landscapes that provide ecological, social and economic benefits, Kate Kennen started her own landscape architecture firm in 2004. Kate has over seven years experience designing built landscapes for high end residential, commercial, municipal, and resort projects. A recent graduate of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Kate has focused her work to create landscapes on Cape Cod. Cape Cod’s unique position as a peninsula with finite resources and only 12% of land area left developable* is a challenging landscape environment to help find solutions for landscape change and betterment. Kate’s current clients on the Cape include the Town of Barnstable, where she is completing conceptual design for several municipal open space projects and LIFE Mashpee (Living Independently Forever Incorporated) where she is working to update the current campus site plan to provide an esthetically attractive landscape that integrates resident day to day activities.

Although varied in scale and client-type, Kate’s work has a consistent thread of landscape sensitivity in all designed projects. The intensity of rapid decentralized urbanization, as well as a lack of understanding of landscape ecology, have allowed natural systems in the US to be ignored as resources for water, sustainable energy generation, clean air, diversified transportation options, and recreation. Kate’s work focuses alleviating landscapes of traditionally intense maintenance regimes, draining client funds while dumping tons of nitrogen fertilizer and water onto lawns and plantings. An alternate landscape model is used where productive open spaces can achieve advanced ecological and social benefit, and potentially economic revenues as well.

*Cape Cod Commission website http://www.capecodcommission.org