The designer Katie Ridder’s home in Millbrook, New York.

Stephen Sills’s home in Bedford, New York.

The late Barbara Wiseley’s garden in Montecito.

Charlotte Moss’s garden in East Hampton.

Martyn Lawrence Bullard’s garden in the Hollywood Hills.

*Top,* Thomas O’Brien’s garden in Bellport, New York; *above,* Sills’s guesthouse in Bedford.

Maxine Sloss’s garden in the Scottish Borders.

The Secret Gardens

From Stephen Sills’s retreat in Westchester to Veere Grenney’s oasis in Tangier, a new coffee-table book showcases the private sanctuaries of celebrated interior designers

When looking at the work of the world’s best interior designers, it becomes clear that designing a garden isn’t so different from designing a house. “My approach to gardening and decorating is similar,” the renowned American designer Bunny Williams has said. “I believe that both require a strong structure as a starting point.”

At her home in Falls Village, Connecticut, Williams created that structure with boxwood hedges, then laid out her vegetable garden with the geometric precision of a floor plan. The result is a series of plots that feel like rooms in which the wild and the prim coexist.