Turning Lifestyles Inside Out

Leaning against the big mud-splattered SUV that doubles as his office, this burly, 6-foot-3 landscape designer looks like he would be more comfortable digging planting holes than sketching with a drafting pencil. Yet Nick Williams, one of the most respected garden-makers in the Southland, was recently chosen to design not one, but two, of the innovative, cutting-edge patios on display at the Arboretum of Los Angeles County.

This year, one of his residential gardens won a Sunset Western Garden Design Award. The owners of the garden, Don and Catherine Gershman, kidded Williams that the award must have been for “The Most Stuff You Can Fit in a Small Space” because of what’s in their compact 40-by-50-foot garden.

The 59-year-old Williams, who has designed about 500 gardens over 20 years, is known for gardens that are not only visually exciting, but are also livable and full of creature comforts. If that’s not asking enough of a garden design, he wants it all to look perfectly natural.

He’s not happy unless his designs coax clients to spend time in the garden. For Williams, the challenge is to lure people outside and then keep them there. “Put in a fireplace and some low-voltage lighting, and you can keep them into the night,” he added.

“You’ve heard of gardens as outdoor rooms,” Williams explained. “Well, I prefer to think of a garden as an outdoor adventure.” His gardens--no matter how small--typically include places to walk to and explore, as well as places to cook, dine or camp out around a roaring fire.

Clients have even told him that their backyards are better than the resorts they stay at while on vacation. “What thrills me most,” said Williams, “is hearing a client say that the garden has actually changed their life.”

The Gershmans, who are both retired--although he oversees a charitable foundation--had simply wanted their garden to distract attention from the towering Westwood high-rises that loom over their home. “We asked Nick to make the city go away. He gave us an urban oasis,” said Catherine Gershman. Now, it takes a few moments before the high-rises are even noticed through the trellises and trees, and then one is startled by their size and closeness.

A cozy, natural stone patio with a big outdoor fireplace sits right outside the backdoor, almost like an extension of the living room. While warming oneself by the fire, one sees fish dart between lily pads in a pond beside the fireplace.

The pond is fed by a stream that comes from farther up a little hill. Follow a path to the top and you find a spa tucked into a clutch of very believable man-made boulders. This is not a hilly part of Westwood, however. The garden is on level land, and all the changes in elevation are man-made. “For weeks it looked like a war zone,” said Ron Gershman, as heaps of dirt were moved around and piled up or dug into.

Another winding path leads to a little sitting area tucked into a corner of the yard so it seems far away. Surrounded by flowers, the chairs are lightly shaded by a trellis that was actually attached to the neighbor’s garage wall. Little tricks like this make Williams’ gardens seem larger.

*

Wearing a black jacket with “Nick” on the front, he explained some of his landscaping sleight-of-hand while riding around in his movable office, a big Ford Explorer Limited filled with gear--two car phones, a pager, laptop and tape recorder, plus gloves and orange-handled Corona pruning shears under the seat. Though Williams & Associates has 16 employees and an office in Tarzana, he spends his life at job sites and in the car.

Williams grew up in Tarzana and actually won his first gardening award when he was just 16, taking second place in a competition for high school horticulture students (back when Los Angeles city schools had such a program). He slowly built up a 350-employee commercial landscaping firm but sold it 22 years ago to start his residential design business, because “I’d much rather work in someone’s backyard.” He lives in the Santa Monica Mountains in Cold Canyon, and his own garden is full of sycamores, redwoods and other native plants. “It’s real natural,” he said. He’s even married to a woman named, appropriately, Tree, a nickname she got from her sister when they were young.

Williams is a fan of outdoor fireplaces, such as the one in the Gershmans’ garden. Both of the Arboretum demonstration patios have them.

A fireplace not only takes the chill off evenings and mornings (two of their favorite times of day), but the flames add a little dancing sparkle to the garden--you could even cook over them during a blackout. Williams has even put flames in the middle of some of his fountains, plumbing them for natural gas, so a little flicker seems to dance above the water. One of his sons, Tory, designs and makes many of the highly sculptural fountains used in his gardens.

*

Williams thinks water is the most important element you can add to a garden, and he insists that ponds and ornamental pools be planted, and stocked with fish, because they add so much interest to a garden. “Think about it,” he said. “There’s no point looking into an ornamental fountain, but you’ll always stop to see what the fish are doing in a planted pond.”

The third ingredient in his fire-water-earth scheme is to use lots of natural materials. Even the huge artificial boulders surrounding spas or holding up hillsides look remarkably real. But real, honest-to-goodness natural stone is also heavily used, especially underfoot.

Williams likes for the paving material to change as you wander through a garden so it seems like you’re leaving civilization and heading into the woods, the paths getting ever more primitive as you travel. He’ll start with elegant slabs of flagstone, change to gravel and end up with rustic shredded bark.

Another visual trick is to change elevations in the garden. “Simply raising part of the garden by 18 inches will make a huge difference,” he said.

By cocking the patio and its overhead trellis at a 45-degree angle to the house--which he did in the Gershman garden--he gains ground by refocusing attention on the longer diagonal sight line. Instead of staring straight at the back wall, you look at the more distant corners, which makes the little garden seem much larger.

A few blocks away, he worked his magic on an even smaller garden, where there was barely room for a bench between the rear wall of the house and the back fence. He somehow managed to squeeze in a little plant-choked water feature, but most of the garden’s outdoor living space ended up in the driveway alongside the house.

It doubles as a patio and along one edge he managed to squeeze in a barbecue and serving counter. Dining is on the driveway, and the tables and chairs are simply moved aside when it’s time to park the car, an efficient use of space on a cramped lot in a dense part of town.

Orange bougainvillea are trained against the sandstone-colored walls, and a handsome planting of succulents grows inside the old oil drip strip in the center of the driveway. Luckily, cars don’t drip oil the way they used to, so the succulents are thriving, even though there’s a car over them part of the time.

Close by, in the frontyard, Williams rebuilt an existing wall and replaced some rusted fencing with new wrought iron, moving it out just far enough to put in a trademark fountain, which the whole neighborhood can enjoy. In true Williams fashion, the fountain is so heavily planted it almost looks like a jungle ruin.

While they were excavating for the fountain, owners Alan and Jane Raphael--he’s retired but manages property, and she works with the state department of social services--found a few old, brightly glazed tiles from the ‘20s that matched the tiles near their entry. Williams incorporated them into the facade of the new barbecue, which helps tie old and new together--so seamlessly that it is difficult to tell what was built when.

*

But that’s the idea. “In the end, I want it to look like we’ve done nothing, that even the water was already there,” said Williams. And though everything looks natural and settled in his gardens, it’s still pretty obvious that someone worked long and hard to get it to that admirable state.