Weaving the Sonoran Desert into Everyday Life
Set between the White Tank Mountains and the Belmont Mountain Range and influenced by the natural systems of the Hassayampa River corridor, Floreo at Teravalis emerges from a landscape distinctly its own. As the first village within Howard Hughes Communities' 37,000-acre Teravalis master-planned community, the 3,029-acre village presented an opportunity to establish an identity that could only belong to this place.
For Arizona-based land planning and landscape architecture firm ABLA, that meant looking beyond individual parks and amenities to consider how the Sonoran Desert could become part of everyday life within the community.
More than 85 acres of multigenerational parks are woven together with preserved open space and trails to form a connected landscape across the village. The result brings nature and recreation within a 10-minute walk of every home while creating pedestrian connections between neighborhoods and the places residents encounter throughout their day.
The landscape is not something residents have to seek out. It becomes part of how they experience Floreo.
A Landscape That Teaches
The Sonoran Desert is one of the most biologically diverse deserts in the world. At Floreo, that ecology became more than inspiration for the landscape; it became part of the community's story.
ABLA looked to the pollinators that sustain the desert and the relationships between them to establish a narrative that unfolds differently across Floreo's parks. Each experience has its own identity, while collectively revealing something about the larger ecosystem.
For a child, that story might begin through play—climbing through an environment inspired by bees or encountering the colors and forms associated with butterflies. Farther along the trail, those ideas begin to connect with the actual landscape as native vegetation, habitat and interpretation reveal the relationships that inspired them.
The experience can be playful without being superficial and educational without feeling instructional. Over time, the landscape itself becomes the storyteller.
Across the village, these experiences establish a common language that gives Floreo's parks individual character while connecting them to something larger: the desert they inhabit.
Open Space as the Framework
At Floreo, open space was not planned as a collection of destinations inserted between neighborhoods. It became part of the structure around which the village was organized.
Community parks create larger moments for recreation and gathering. Neighborhood parks bring those experiences closer to home. Between them, trails and preserved landscapes create continuity, allowing residents to move naturally from their neighborhoods to schools, employment, commercial areas and community destinations.
The significance of that network is found as much in the ordinary moments as the programmed ones.
A walk to school can become time spent outside together. A trip to the park can begin at the front door rather than in a car. A trail can become the place where neighbors repeatedly cross paths until unfamiliar faces become familiar ones.
In that way, landscape becomes connective tissue for the community. Parks and trails are still destinations, but their greater value comes from what happens between them—creating a village where outdoor life is embedded into the rhythm of the day.
Designing for a Desert Future
Living closely with the desert also means accepting responsibility for how development responds to it.
At Floreo, more than 600 acres of preserved open space maintain connections through the existing landscape, allowing habitat and community life to coexist rather than treating one as separate from the other. The same thinking carries into the developed landscape, where planting and water use respond to the realities of an arid environment while remaining distinctly Sonoran in character.
Even after sunset, that relationship continues. Dark Sky principles allow the desert night to remain part of the experience while reducing unnecessary impacts on wildlife and pollinator activity.
These decisions are important individually, but their greater value comes from working together. Water, habitat, vegetation, wildlife and human activity are treated as parts of the same living system.
Environmental stewardship, as a result, does not have to announce itself. Residents experience it simply by living within the community.
Planning with Structure, Designing with Intention
Floreo demonstrates what can happen when landscape architecture is brought into the conversation early enough to influence not just what a community looks like, but how it works and what it stands for.
Character, ecology, recreation and connectivity were considered together from the earliest stages of planning. That allowed individual parks, trails and open spaces to develop their own experiences while continuing to reinforce the identity of the larger village.
The result is a community shaped by its setting rather than placed upon it.
At Floreo, the Sonoran Desert is not simply preserved at the edges or referenced through a planting palette. Its patterns, relationships and character are woven throughout the village—in the way people move, gather, play, learn and experience the outdoors.
The desert is not the backdrop to life at Floreo.
It is part of the life of Floreo.
