Fast Bio
David Bishop is the founder of Elevation Living Walls, creating plant-driven environments for hospitality, commercial, and luxury residential spaces.
Founder • Speaker • Biophilic Design Practitioner
David
Bishop
Designer of remarkable environments. Builder of living systems.
David Bishop is the founder of Elevation Living Walls, a Southern California design-build studio creating plant-driven environments for hospitality, commercial, and luxury residential spaces. His story spans international product development, garden design, reinvention, and a return to the power of plants to connect people with place.
About David Bishop
A creative career shaped by design, commerce, reinvention, and a return to the garden.
David Bishop is the founder of Elevation Living Walls, a Southern California design-build studio creating custom living walls, vertical gardens, and biophilic environments for hospitality, commercial, and luxury residential spaces.
Long before Elevation, David built a successful business in the home and garden trade through Planet Import, Inc. and the Habitudes brand. As a designer, importer, and product developer, he worked across factories, materials, retail programs, and wholesale distribution — developing pottery, fountains, garden décor, and lifestyle products for the home and garden marketplace.
When the loss of a major client forced a professional reinvention, David returned to the disciplines that had always grounded him — drawing, landscape composition, product design, construction, and the belief that environments can profoundly shape how people feel. What began as adversity ultimately became alignment. His ability to sketch, visualize, compose, and tell a spatial story evolved into a design-build practice rooted in biophilic thinking, craftsmanship, engineering, and the creation of remarkable living environments.
Today, through Elevation Living Walls, David collaborates on hospitality, commercial, and luxury residential projects that merge architecture, planting, irrigation strategy, and experiential design into immersive spaces intended to be both memorable and enduring.
“Plants Grow People™. When thoughtfully designed and properly built, living environments change the way people feel, gather, work, and connect.”
Over time, living walls became more than a product category. They became a medium — a way to merge architecture, horticulture, hospitality, wellness, engineering, and emotional experience into one living system.
Today, Elevation Living Walls reflects that evolution: a multidisciplinary design-build practice creating immersive plant-driven environments for hospitality, commercial, experiential, and luxury residential spaces. From boutique courtyards and wellness environments to large-scale hospitality installations and nationally recognized brand activations, the work is rooted in the belief that remarkable spaces should perform as beautifully as they look — and feel.
Narrative Arc
From product development to plant-driven environments.
David’s story is not a straight line from business to business. It is a creative arc shaped by design, disruption, reinvention, and the discovery that plants have the power to connect people back to themselves and each other.
Creative Commerce
Industrial design, home and garden product development, international sourcing, pottery, fountains, planters, and trade distribution.
The Cliff
A major customer collapse forced a defining business pivot and opened the door to a more personal kind of creative work.
Return to the Garden
Drawing, landscape composition, and helping people define their aesthetic reconnected the work to plants, place, and human experience.
Living Systems
Living walls became the medium where architecture, horticulture, construction, hospitality, and emotion could converge.
Teaching the Category
Through Plant Hackers Network, David now helps others enter the living wall category with craft, structure, and confidence.
Press Kit
A media-ready resource for editors, event organizers, and industry publications.
Built to provide fast access to approved bios, speaking topics, project highlights, photography, and background materials for editorial features, podcasts, conferences, and hospitality media coverage.
Short Bio
David Bishop is the founder of Elevation Living Walls, a Southern California design-build studio creating custom living walls and plant-driven environments. His nearly 30-year career spans home and garden product development, horticulture, construction, international sourcing, and the reinvention of spaces through biophilic design.
Speaker Bio
David Bishop is the founder of Elevation Living Walls, a Southern California design-build studio specializing in custom living walls, vertical gardens, and biophilic environments. His nearly 30-year career spans home and garden product development, international sourcing, horticulture, construction, and hospitality-focused design. After building a successful pottery import business through Planet Import, Inc. and the Habitudes brand, a major business disruption led David back to the garden — where drawing, landscape composition, and living walls became a new path of service. His work centers on a simple belief: Plants Grow People™.
Longer editorial background
David Bishop’s work is rooted in the connection between people, plants, materials, and place. Before founding Elevation Living Walls, Bishop built decades of experience in international product development through Planet Import, Inc. and the Habitudes brand, working directly with factories, artisans, and production teams to develop home and garden products for the trade. When a major customer collapse forced a business pivot, he found his way back to the garden through drawing, landscape composition, and helping people define the story of their outdoor environments. That lived understanding of design, commerce, materials, horticulture, and human emotion now informs his work at Elevation — where living walls are treated not as decoration, but as living systems that shape how people experience space.
Design • Product • Build Perspective
From national retail programs to living architecture.
David’s career spans product design, international manufacturing, merchandising, and design-build environments. Through Habitudes and Planet Import, his work has reached major national retailers including Costco, Lowe’s, Home Depot, HomeGoods, TJX, and other large-scale retail channels.
His creative background also includes work for Disney, Godiva Chocolate, and other brand-driven design programs where storytelling, presentation, and emotional connection mattered as much as production detail.
That perspective now informs the work at Elevation Living Walls and Plant Hackers. Successful living environments require more than visual inspiration. They depend on structure, irrigation, drainage, installation sequencing, maintenance access, plant health, and operational clarity.
By combining artistic vision with field-tested execution, David approaches living walls as fully integrated systems designed to perform over time in hospitality, commercial, and luxury residential environments.
Selected Work
Projects that help define the category.
A curated look at hospitality, branded, experiential, and private residential environments connected to Elevation Living Walls.
Hospitality
Portola Hotel & Spa
Monterey hospitality living wall transformation designed to elevate guest experience and long-term plant performance.
Commercial Brand
Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf
Branded living wall environments designed for visibility, guest interaction, and memorable customer experience.
Luxury Residential
Private Residence
Plant-driven outdoor living environments crafted to blur the boundary between architecture and nature.
Experiential
Coachella Activation
Large-scale branded plant environments designed for engagement, atmosphere, and social storytelling.
Hospitality
Westin Book Cadillac
Hospitality-focused living wall installation designed to enrich architectural atmosphere and guest perception.
Speaking & Thought Leadership
Available for keynotes, panels, podcasts, PK meetings, CEUs, and editorial features.
David brings a practitioner’s perspective to conversations at the intersection of biophilic design, hospitality experience, living systems, product development, business building, and category leadership.
Design + Biophilic Leadership
Why Most Living Walls Fail
A systems-level conversation about irrigation, drainage, root volume, plant health, specification decisions, and the gap between beautiful renderings and buildable reality.
Biophilic ROI
How plant-driven environments influence guest experience, emotional memory, social engagement, and brand differentiation within hospitality spaces.
Building Remarkable Spaces
How living architecture, plants, containers, and atmosphere can transform ordinary spaces into environments people remember, photograph, and talk about.
Plants Grow People™
A broader keynote about connection, wellness, community, and how thoughtfully designed environments influence the way people feel, gather, and interact.
Business + Leadership
From Contractor To Category Leader
How contractors stop competing on price and begin building authority, trust, influence, and a position the market remembers.
Selling Outcomes, Not Systems
Why clients buy confidence, transformation, and reduced risk before they buy features, materials, systems, or specifications.
The Long Game
How trust, relationships, reputation, consistency, and patience compound into better opportunities over time.
Building Your Moat
How entrepreneurs create advantages competitors cannot easily copy through relationships, reputation, systems, content, community, and trust.
Media Access
Press resources available by request.
Approved biographies, project photography, founder images, logos, and background materials are available for qualified media, podcast producers, event organizers, and industry publications.
Headshots
Professional portraits and speaking images for editorial, podcast, and event use.
Project Photography
Approved hospitality, commercial, residential, and experiential living wall imagery.
Company Logos
Elevation Living Walls, Plant Hackers Network, Habitudes, and associated brand assets.
Approved Bios
Short, medium, and long-form biographies formatted for media and event teams.
Press • Speaking • Collaboration
Interested in an interview, feature, or speaking opportunity?
For media inquiries, speaking engagements, hospitality partnerships, PK meetings, CEUs, or project consultation opportunities, please contact Elevation Living Walls.
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