The United States trains hundreds of landscape architects each year. Many of them will work in cultural contexts with which they are unfamiliar at some point in their careers. Designing in an unfamiliar cultural context without extensive knowledge of the host culture creates the possibility of severe conflict between designed intent and actual use. This thesis looks at the topics of culture, cross-cultural study, and cross-cultural experiences as they relate to design and examines the tools available to designers for cross-cultural design. Terry Harkness Distillation Technique is used as a case study to demonstrate a design method that can allow designers working in unfamiliar contexts of which they have not experience to create landscapes that reference local culture contexts.