Founder

A smiling woman with shoulder-length dark hair, wearing earrings, a navy blazer, and a white top, in a well-lit indoor setting with plants in the background.
A smiling woman with shoulder-length dark hair, wearing earrings, a navy blazer, and a white top, in a well-lit indoor setting with plants in the background.

Yuan Zhang works at the intersection of design and culture.

She is a licensed landscape architect (PLA, LEED AP) with twelve years of experience across three continents, including projects such as Jewel Changi Airport, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Masdar City and Plan Capital Abu Dhabi 2040. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design(RISD) and a Bachelor of Science from Peking University, and spent over a decade shaping projects at award-winning firms including Payette, CBT Architects, and AECOM before founding Orys. She has served as a visiting critic at RISD, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and the Boston Architectural College.

Yuan brings the same design judgment once applied to public projects and large scale master plans, to the scale of a home garden and its interiors, offering everything from design consultation to full design build for clients who want every space they live in held to the same standard as everything else they've built with care.

She is also the founder of SAWY(Saturday Afternoon With Yuan), a Boston based cultural platform hosting gatherings, tea experiences, and programs rooted in Eastern philosophy and art.

Living room wall with framed artwork, guitar, and couch with floral pillows.

Philosophy

Good design starts with listening, to the people who live in a space, and to the land itself. Every project starts as a conversation, not a template.

From there, design becomes an act of embracing full living, how a family gathers, how light moves through a room, how a garden changes with the seasons. Nothing exists in isolation, and neither should design.

And beyond the individual home, we design with the larger context in mind, the ecology, the climate, the neighborhood a space belongs to. A garden or an interior should not only serve the people within it, but also give something back to the world around it.

The Name

Orys takes its name from Yuan's own name, 源, meaning “origin”. To design well is to return, again and again, to the essence of a place, and the life it holds.