STYLE : STYLEMAKER : Power Landscaping
Whether the job is up the street from her office or halfway around the world, garden designer Nancy Goslee Power demands that each of her residential landscapes is not only appropriate for the house, the client and the climate but is sophisticated, voluptuous and sculptural as well. Her own widely publicized garden in Santa Monica is a good example: The sunken pond out front, the fountain in back and the courtyard reflecting pool suit her Mediterranean-style home. Santa Barbara daisies, matilija poppies and roses provide the color she wants; New Zealand flax and pride of Madeira, the strong foliage. And everything is drought-tolerant.
“It’s very aggressive; it’s not wimpy. It holds its own,” says architect Frank Gehry in describing Power’s garden design and the reasons he chose Power to design the landscaping for his Disney Concert Hall in downtown L.A. “We wanted somebody who wouldn’t be intimidated by my architecture.”
Power and her partner, architect Brian Tichenor, ascribe her bold use of plants to her passion for the arts and travel. Power has walked many of the great gardens of the world, analyzing them and borrowing from them. The fountain in her back yard “is a rip-off from Pompeii,” she says. And for the Disney project, she plans to use Italian stone pines with Canary Island date palms, a striking combination she glimpsed along a road in southern Tuscany.
From her family of Delaware farmers and designers (her parents built the first international-style house in their 18th-Century town), Power developed an eye for plants and architecture early on. As an art student, she spent two years in Florence and became a “born-again Italian.” Then, before switching to her current field, she worked in New York as an interior designer. “I learned a lot about discipline, antiques, French style, the old way of doing things,” she says. “But it’s important to look at the present, too, to know what people are thinking and feeling now.”
Since she moved to the West Coast 15 years ago, Power’s work has come to represent a new California garden style that pays homage to classical European gardens but relies on the native and imported plants that thrive here. Garden connoisseurs revere plantsmanship--knowing one’s plants--and Richard Martin, an L.A. architect and client, says admiringly: “Nancy has a tremendous sense of local plant materials. She has a sense of what California is really like, what feels right here.”
