Downtown Houston

Two downtown plots, both boxed in: a small enclosed courtyard with a clipped green border and a paved edge, and a side passage barely wider than a doorway, laid in turf between a hedge wall and a planter run.

Inner-city courtyards get almost no direct sun and have no route for water except the drain they were built with. Turf solves the first outright, and the second is handled in the base — a graded, free-draining platform tied into the existing fall, so an enclosed space does not hold water against the building.