It's an overused expression, but I do think good fences make good neighbors, and good fences can be so delightful. There is nothing like a sculptural wall, be it stone, wood or planting to define a space. Here are some favorites that I've come across in the last few years in person and in print, and a couple that I have worked on. Designers, when known, are credited in each image title.
Wishing you all a 2010 filled with creativity, productivity and happiness.
We are spending January wrapping up our construction drawings for Templeton Ridge Winery & Burbank Vineyards. It should be a beautiful project when all is complete. Construction on the landscape for the main house should begin this spring (pictured above), and design development for the new cellar and tasting room facility should follow shortly after.
An underemployed landscape architect in LA has started www.livingchristmas.com. Recently profiled in the New York Times, the business delivers potted trees (in bio-diesel trucks) and picks them up again 2-3 weeks later to return them to a happy life in a local nursery. A little pricey, but a great idea. One of the nicest features: a family can rent the same tree year after year, and watch it grow.
Way to go Archinect for setting up a design competition in reaction to the referendum recently passed in Switzerland banning the construction of new minarets. What a great way to re-examine religious freedom and shifting cultural landscapes. Archinect is right, Switzerland, we have a problem.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation has launched a new database of designed and vernacular landscapes that could potentially grow into a useful reference for designers and design enthusiasts. The real promise of What's Out There is that new projects can be submitted to the database, which could loosen some of TCLF's who's who parameters and create a rich collection of contemporary projects rather than a catalog of the canon.
The rendering above shows our current plan for the residential garden on El Pomar Road in Templeton, California. The project also includes the landscape surrounding a second agricultural manager's residence, the long entry road into the property and vineyard, and eventually could include the areas surrounding a new tasting room. For the main house, the clients wanted an aesthetic that was low maintenance, agrarian, and strong, and worked with the hot San Louis Obispo County inland climate.
As an alternative to lawn, we have decided to plant no mow meadow grasses around the house, surrounded by a taller meadow of mixed pennisetum and nassella grasses to echo the golden hills surrounding the property. There really is no need for a traditional lawn in a climate like this, and also no reason to give up on having a lush, walkable, green landscape to relax in.
The San Francisco Botanical Garden Gondwana Circle Design Competition has announced a winner. Congratulations to Michael Overby and Emma Fuller for their design, titled Roving Mass.
Gondwana is the name of one half of the landmass of Pangea after the split some 200 million years ago, and the goal of the competition was to redesign a planting circle in such a way as to familiarize visitors with plate tectonics and plant evolution. Nearly 100 entries were received from around the world, below are just a few.
I’ve noticed a huge rise in the popularity of outdoor kitchens lately. I love, and am all for barbecues, fire pits, eating areas, pergolas, and pizza ovens, but the huge industrial kitchen structures that have been filling up pages and pages in landscape magazines lately have me a little off put. Why not keep it simple (and keep those energy bills in check)? Attached are some gorgeous examples of affordable, beautiful, eating, lounging and food prep areas.
We recently visited some impressive gardens on Kaua’i, including the Limahuli and Allterton portions of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens, as well as the grounds of Kaua’i’s Hindu Monastery. The National Tropical Botanical Gardens are located on Kaua’i, Maui, and in Biscayne Bay, Florida and include everything from formal estate gardens to 1000 year old lava rock planting terraces filled with taro. The Hindu Monastery is a quirky, gorgeously sited retreat, where they are painstakingly building an elaborately carved stone temple by hand. Now I wish I had a little Ganesh with a parasol in my garden too.
I couldn’t recommend the Palmwood Bed and Breakfast more highly. This isn’t the kind of bed and breakfast one might normally envision: one of overstuffed furniture, lacy curtains and cat smells. Its the most luxurious and homey place we’ve stayed in a long time. The furnishings are all crafted out of palmwood and leather, giving the place a breezy, relaxing and distinctly Hawaiian feeling. I was so relieved to have a break from the Tuscan/Arts and Crafts/kitschy Hawaiiana fantasias of the south shore when we pulled in here.
Proprietor Eddi Henry is also an amazing cook, and the breakfasts that we faced each morning were a dream. Crabcakes & tropical fruits? Banana Pancakes? Sure. Some starfruit juice with crushed mint to go with that? Don’t mind if I do.
The gardens were lush, and full of palms, bromeliads and bubbling fountains. Not to mention an amazing lava rock outdoor shower. Can you tell its a little hard for me to face the rain and 20 degree drop in temperature here in San Francisco this morning?
We are nearly finished with drafting the bid documents for our project on El Pomar Road in Templeton, California. Nicole and I merged an orthogonal plan and a curvilinear plan to create a hybrid of the two that has grown into a design that feels fresh and dynamic. The geometry of the house was challenging to work with, and we decided to reinforce the primary entrance and egress with strong rectilinear stepping stones, and weave the house into the greater landscape with gently arcing concrete paths.
The planting will include lavenders, grasses and native shrubs and will be punctuated by grand shade trees and drifts of olives. As you can see in the plan, the linear vineyard planting comes right up to the edges of the house, and we plan to blend the residential garden into the rest of the winery landscape with lush meadows and ornamental grasses.
I cant think of a better place to wander, look at plants, and have coffee while leafing through garden design books. Flora Grubb Gardens on Jerrold Avenue in San Francisco is a boutique nursery with a ton of gorgeous plants. Its an excellent place to get some refreshing design ideas, and to pick up a plant or two for your deck. I'll add them to my links section - they usually have some worthwhile talks on modern garden design, low water gardens, and diy projects.
I'm not sure if the goal of "restoring New York to what it once was" can ever be physically perceptible, but the virtual restoration on themannahattaproject.org is fascinating. There is something very small and poetic about reintroducing native plant species to an environment like New York, and something very elegiac about seeing the same seasonal changes that were once happening on the island 400 years ago. For an introduction to the project, see the Restoring Mannahatta article in the Home and Garden section of the New York Times.
Nicole Kelly and I have found our scope expanding at the vineyard on El Pomar in Templeton, California. We just came back from a wonderful trip South where we spent a relaxing weekend with the clients and developed a quick plan for a new agricultural manager’s residence being built on the property.
After a recent visit to the PCCD Offices on Third Street in Los Altos, I was pleased to see everything has filled in well in the last year. The myoporum groundcover is turning into a welcome, lush, green carpet, and the agaves and maples are really filling out.
This summer, Third Nature Studio was featured in Apartment Therapy’s “My Great Outdoors” Showcase. The project got lots of rave reviews, and I am so thankful to the publishers for including the project in their online publication.
Knut Hamsun is one of Norway's Nobel Prize winning authors, and one of the most problematic and divisive figures in its literary history. He was an overt Nazi sympathizer and at the same time, is celebrated as being one of the founders of modern literature. Architect Steven Holl created a Hamsun Center in Hamsun's home town Presteid, hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle. It sounds like the Center hopes to invite and continue critque of his life and work, rather than celebrate him as a hero, and lets hope it is a step in the right direction for challenging and examining his life and his literature. There is an intriguing article in the Guardian about the Center here.
Nicole Kelly and I are continuing our work on a winery and future bed and breakfast in Templeton, California. Above is a quick perspective showing a small patio off of two guest rooms that will be just steps away from meadow and rows and rows of grapes. For this patio, our goal is to frame it while keeping it open to the vineyard, and to provide some much needed shade. We plan to replace the trellis with trees to simplify the design, and revise the plant palette to include more grasses, sages, rosemaries and lavenders.
The last few punch list items have finally been completed by the contractor, and the landscape at NE 99th in Portland is complete! Now all there is left to do is paint the house slate grey, and decorate. Thanks to the amazing powers of the Oregon climate and the skill of the contractor, everything is growing like its on steroids. The garden should look lush and beautiful for the upcoming August wedding.
This project was done in collaboration with Stephanie Stillman for a luxury residence near Duboce Park in San Francisco. A two unit building was converted into a single residence, and Third Nature Studio provided landscape design services for the developer. The palette is simple, lush and drought tolerant – all vibrant green agaves, bright blue senecio succulents, and trailing rosemary. Three Arbutus ‘Marina’ trees anchor the front and back yards, and their firey red bark will stand in refreshing contrast to the the cool jewel tones of the succulents. Materials used include grey crushed granite paving, architectural slab pavers, and simple vine covered metal mesh trellises set over beautifully distressed brick.
