The Past as Prelude
With its towering trees, shady lawns and flower-edged meadow, this Bel-Air garden looks as if it’s grown here forever. Not so. A mere four years ago, that poetic meadow was a prosaic parking lot, and brick paving covered much of the ground around the house, a 1940s Paul Williams design. “We bought the property not for what it was but what it could be,” says the owner, who fell in love with the stately house and its winding, woodsy entry drive but bemoaned the harshness of a garden with too few blooms and too much brick.
She and her husband, both of whom work in the entertainment business, sought out Rios Associates, a Los Angeles design firm that handles architecture and landscape, to expand and renovate the house and tie it in with a new and much-improved garden. A team of designers--Mark Rios, Mark Tessier, Corinne Capiaux, Richard Prantis and Jon Black--applied their talents to the two-part project, which eventually expanded to include the lot next door. Architecturally, while maintaining the style and feel of the house, they opened it up to the outside, enlarging windows and adding porches, arcades and trellises. They also carried interior details out into the landscape, taking cues from bronze hardware when they chose fountain materials and from tongue-in-groove wood-paneled walls and ceilings when designing fences and gates.
Outdoors, too, they overhauled paved areas, nixing asphalt for meadow grass, softening the motor court with ligustrum and filling in a bland, rectangular swimming pool that dominated a courtyard behind the house. In its place, to create an inviting view from a new indoor screening room, they planted lawn, and along the back edge, installed a picturesque pond full of water lilies, water iris, pickerel weed and parrot’s beak. On the adjacent lot, which the owners acquired two years ago, they built a new pool with an infinity edge, cantilevering it over a slope and adding a catch basin below so that the water appears to flow out unimpeded into the distance. After an extensive remodel, the existing 1950s ranch house became guest quarters and pool pavilion, and Rios joined the two properties with a sloping lawn and a curved brick staircase.
Repeating the brick, albeit sparingly, became a unifying theme, says Tessier, as did using the same plants in different areas. ‘Natchez’ crape myrtles, for example, bloom white at the meadow’s edge, behind the pond and near the pool house, while white abutilons, white azaleas, westringias and Pittosporum tobira ‘Variegata’ appear in perennial borders from one end of the combined 3 1/2-acre landscape to the other.
“I prefer a mostly green-and-white palette to a lot of color,” says the owner, who knows spring has arrived when 200 white callas suddenly open along the drive. One exception to the color rule is a tucked-away terrace that features the multihued roses her husband loves. Nearby, purple lantana crawls along a vintage pergola and a secluded gazebo offers a perfect spot for a quiet lunch.
These remnants from an earlier era were carefully preserved and incorporated into the new design: “No one had the heart to take them down,” says the owner. In fact, she adds, the older parts lend the new a look of age that she appreciates. “The whole garden feels established,” she observes, “comfortably lived-in as opposed to just-planted.”
