Crossing Boundaries
When New Yorkers Dee and Randy Paul moved west 11 years ago, they expected to settle in a proper California house--that is, a stuccoed Spanish with thick walls and a tile roof. What they didn’t bank on was the power of the Western setting, and how it would change their style of living altogether.
“We were dazzled by the light here--the way it bounced off walls and permeated rooms,” says Dee Paul, an art director who began designing gardens in 1994. “It was so clear that in this warm, dry place, life should flow in and out of a house and not be confined by it.” As she and her husband toured 1920s-era real estate, she remembers, “We kept looking for openings, places where walls could be broken out to let in views and air.”
The solution, when it finally came, seemed disarmingly simple: Lose the walls altogether. Find a house with only a fine line between indoors and out, the sort that sprang up in California after World War II, along with kidney-shaped swimming pools.
After a brief stint in a 1950s wood-and-glass house by architect Lloyd Wright, the Pauls’ search ended in the Los Feliz enclave of Laughlin Park, where they bought what Dee calls “a fishbowl with a parabolic roof.” Designed in the early ‘60s by Joseph Takahashi, the house takes full advantage of its half-acre setting: Its rear facade is almost entirely glass. Living room, kitchen and bedrooms have unobstructed garden views and sliding doors that erase the inside-out distinction.
When the Pauls arrived in 1994, the views were already dramatic, thanks to the curvaceous pool and existing specimen trees such as Mexican blue and desert date palms. But these were awash in a sea of ivy, which Dee, an avid gardener with a fine-arts background, immediately nixed for more interesting greens. To create a graphic, painterly composition, especially compelling from a distance, she chose sculptural plants such as silver-blue agaves and bronze flax, and tossing grasses in greens and golds. Both on a hillside behind the house and in island beds around the pool, she mixed succulents with other drought-tolerant plants--California poppies, yellow-blooming bulbinella--appropriate to the dry setting. Her few thirsty plants include what roses she couldn’t resist (‘Abraham Darby,’ climbing red ‘Altissimo’), along with fragrant or edible picks, such as gardenias and tomatoes, tucked away in a hilltop vegetable patch. And given the presence of the Pauls’ two sons, Nick, 14, and Noah, 12, another plant quality Dee valued was toughness. As a result, lavender and rosemary, both tough and fragrant, grow alongside a strip of lawn where the boys play catch.
In the front garden, far from the family’s gathering spots, Dee took out lawn to grow sculpturally-leafed desert plants--aeoniums, sedums, aloes--that she has arranged around granite boulders. Here, instead of shining from afar, the plants come right up to the wall of the house, which silhouettes them, showing off their seasonal colors. In early winter, bright-orange sticks on fire mingle with lemon-yellow acacia blooms, while cactus and aloes flower later, toward spring. “In this climate,” Dee observes, “you can have almost anything you can imagine in your garden. The challenge is to simplify--not to try and have it all at once!”
WHAT INSPIRES DEE PAUL IN THE GARDEN:
The words of Berkeley architect William Turnbull, who called California architecture “landscape design with occasional rooms in case of rain.”
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French Impressionist paintings, which can have the impact of “gardens viewed through squinting eyes.”
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Fieldstone walls in France and England, “made without an ounce of mortar.”
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The garden of her first house in Ramsey, N.J. It was a “Victory” plot, dating from World War II and inherited from the owner, who passed it on with detailed handwritten instructions. “She taught me about plants.”
