COOL, CALM AND COLORFUL
Six years ago, when screenwriter Larry Levin bought his 1960s post-and-beam house in Santa Monica, it had little garden beyond a few oaks, some tree ferns and a swimming pool. He didn’t mind. At the time, he was more concerned with redoing the kitchen and master bath, and updating tired finishes and floors. Once this was done, by architect Mark Mack, Levin met his wife-to-be, Sasha Emerson, a devotee of historic houses who fell for modernism as hard she fell for Levin. They courted at Sunday-morning swap meets, where Emerson, a studio executive-turned-residential designer, helped Levin choose stylish furniture from the ‘30s to the ‘70s. Each had previously been married and had a child, and each wanted to have more children. When they decided to tie the knot, they knew they’d need bigger quarters. Naturally, they called Mack, who designed a two-story bedroom addition. “Our goal,” says Emerson Levin, “was a comfortable, open-feeling house with small bedrooms for privacy and big hubs that we could gather in.”
The same concept was just as useful in the garden, where the Levins wanted a similar sequence of rooms for outdoor dining, lounging and playing. Aesthetically, in place of the flower borders Emerson Levin initially craved, the linear house demanded simpler sweeps of green and an architectural garden layout. And since in most cases, only a glass wall divided indoor and outdoor realms, the two had to be cast as linked parts of a single picture.
In fact, the garden’s outlines already existed when Rob Steiner and Jay Griffith, the former design partners whom the Levins hired to create the landscape, arrived on the scene. The house wrapped around a central courtyard, creating a sunny, protected terrace for the pool. A rear garden wild with ferns opened off the kitchen, master bedroom and living room. Additionally, a street-facing front yard needed only strategic planting--more oak trees and foundation shrubs--to root it firmly in its woodsy neighborhood.
What required the most attention lay behind the house, where an ancient oak cast heavy shade, and the sloping lot made the outdoors cramped and inaccessible. Here the designers carved out family-style patios adjoining the living room and kitchen and a more secluded one off the master bedroom. They terraced the slope to create another tucked-away spot above, this one for the children, and designed a broad stair to connect upper and lower levels. For hardscape, they used a grid of concrete paving stones, softening its edge with ornamental grasses, day lilies and existing tree ferns, regrouped and massed for greater drama. Chartreuse ‘Limelight’ helichrysum mitigated the dark greens, and shade-loving Japanese anemones added blooms.
Near the pool, Griffith and Steiner planted a screening hedge of metrosideros, and they cut planting pockets in the concrete along the water’s edge, filling these with red ‘Maori Queen’ flax. Working with Mack, they enlarged the poolside deck, which Emerson Levin furnished with chartreuse-and-red-striped chairs--from swap meets, of course. And in the front garden, they added splashes of her favorite color with orange clock vine and nasturtiums.
Now, she says, “Whether we’re outside or just looking out the windows, we see a combination of the vibrant and the serene, which, to me, is what a garden should be.”
Sasha Emerson Levin’s Indoor-Outdoor Inspirations:
Her New York City elementary
school, P.S. #116: “This house has the
spareness of a schoolroom, and some
of the garden furniture came from a
school-supply store.”
The graphic punch of Marimekko
textiles.
Central Park: “When you grow up in
a city, you search for green.”
Her children: Eden, 7, Sophie,
6, Isabelle, 2.
