Spend an afternoon driving from Southampton to Montauk and the shift is obvious: hedges are looser, plant palettes lean native, and every other backyard has some version of a fire feature glowing at dusk by early evening. Hamptons landscape design trends move fast, shaped by high design standards, environmental pressure from salt air and deer, and homeowners who want a property to feel current without chasing every fad off a design blog. Here's what's actually showing up on South Fork properties this year, what's worth the investment, and what a quick update can do without a full renovation.
A handful of directions keep showing up on properties from Southampton to Montauk this season:
Native and deer-resistant plantings, styled to look intentional. Bayberry, inkberry holly, switchgrass, and other natives are showing up in beds that used to be all boxwood and hydrangea. The plants survive salt air and deer pressure without help, and the layered, slightly looser look reads as more current than a tightly clipped hedge line.
Edible plants tucked into ornamental beds. Fig trees, blueberry bushes, and culinary herbs are being planted inside decorative borders instead of hidden in a separate vegetable patch. It's a subtle shift, but it turns a garden into something a homeowner actually uses.
Firepit lounges replacing the formal patio as the main gathering spot. A dining table still matters, but the fire feature with low seating around it has become the place people actually end up after dinner.
Layered, low-glare landscape lighting. Uplighting on specimen trees, path lighting set low to the ground, and warm-toned fixtures near seating areas are replacing the single floodlight approach. Lighting is doing more design work than it used to.
Quiet corners built for one, not twelve. Meditation gardens, a hammock tucked off the main lawn, a small yoga deck. Not every square foot of a Hamptons property needs to be built for entertaining.
Reclaimed and repurposed materials as focal points. Old stone, reclaimed timber, and vintage garden structures are being worked into new designs instead of everything reading brand new. It softens a property that would otherwise look freshly installed.
Not every property needs a ground-up landscape design. Some of the biggest visual shifts come from targeted work: reworking the lighting plan around the front entry and pool, refreshing the planting beds that frame the patio, adding a pergola over an underused corner of the yard, or replacing a tired fence with something that actually complements the house. A pergola or a well-placed cluster of specimen plantings can change how a space feels in a matter of days, not months. These are the projects worth asking about before committing to anything larger, and they're often where a design-build team can move fastest, since the same people scoping the work are the ones installing it.
Pricing depends heavily on scope. A design fee alone for a high-end Hamptons property typically starts in five figures and scales from there based on property size and complexity, while a full design-build project, covering everything from plantings to hardscape to installation, commonly lands anywhere from the low five figures for a targeted refresh to well into six figures for a full estate transformation. Labor and materials on the South Fork also run above national averages, largely due to the level of masonry, grading, and horticultural expertise high-end properties require. For a full breakdown of what drives those numbers, Oceanview's guide to landscape design costs in the Hamptons walks through the details.
Not every trend deserves a permanent spot on a property. Firepit lounges and layered lighting are structural enough to age well. A specific plant pairing or a trendy furniture style is easier to swap out later without touching the bones of the design. The properties that hold up best five years out are the ones where the trend elements were treated as details, not the entire plan, built on top of a design that made sense for the property regardless of what was popular that season.
That's the advantage of working with a team that designs and builds in-house. Trend calls get made with an eye toward what a property can actually support long-term, not just what photographs well right now. Oceanview's landscape design process walks through how that plays out from first sketch to finished install, or schedule a consultation to talk through what's worth doing on your property this season.
