Privacy Factor
Four years ago, Richard and Sheri Orne’s house in Mar Vista left little to the imagination of anyone passing by. Built in 1950 of simple cinder-block construction, it perched on a flat lot beside a busy intersection, with nary a hedge to block out prying eyes or the noisy traffic’s ebb and flow. “We lived in a fishbowl,” recalls Sheri, who, with Richard, an architect, runs the design firm Orne and Associates. “People honked and waved as they drove to work.”
Today, you’d be hard-pressed to spot the house as you motored by, so tall and dense are the living screens that surround it, but you’d never mistake the Ornes’ corner. Layered with tossing fountain grass, pampas plumes and blue Muhlenbergia lindheimeri, their garden is the talk of the street, a local landmark, as one neighbor calls it. Instead of honking, several commuters have even left thank-you notes.
Dramatic, dynamic, easy to tend, the Ornes’ garden evolved around three concerns: their need for privacy, their desire for a green view from indoors and their wish to spice up the house yet stay true to its basic character.
In 1994, when they bought the house, it was surrounded by a hodgepodge of aloes--spiky succulents that hugged the front walls, crowded planters and jammed sheds in the backyard. The first task was to cart away these static plants and wipe the outdoor slate clean. Next the windows of the master bedroom needed screening that wouldn’t block out natural light. Richard, one of the architects who planned Universal Citywalk, chose a solution that had worked there--a trellising system called “greenscreen.” Against airy panels of galvanized, powder-coated steel, which he installed on free-standing frames in front of the windows, he planted fast-growing orange clock vine that all but swallowed the frames in a month and a half. Then along the property’s edge near the street, he created an earth berm as a kind of buffer zone from the traffic. In the space leading to the front door, he designed an entry court, complete with new cinder-block walls and a concrete walk in the form of a bridge.
During both the design and planting stages, the Ornes collaborated with Los Angeles landscape architect Rob Steiner and Venice garden designer Jay Griffith. The couple described the look they wanted: “A garden in motion,” Sheri calls it, “tranquil, meditative, dense. It had to be low-maintenance, too, and environmentally friendly.”
Steiner suggested ornamental grasses and took the Ornes to Pomona’s Greenlee Nursery, where they spent a morning choosing a palette. Richard remembers that the grass plugs were so small when planted that the garden looked at first “like a bad hair transplant.” After six months, though, the grasses were tall and full, and ever since, they have thrived with minimal water and weeding and a once-a-year spring cutback.
“What we love most,” Sheri says, “is the garden’s mystery. When you look at the front now, you can’t be sure what lies beyond. It’s an interesting counterpoint, that ambiguity, to such a simple, honest house.”