Remnant Revival
Landscape designer Sean Knibb likes to roam around and brood and kick dirt as he creates a garden. But when he did this for client Sunny Smith, his foot struck stone. It was a buried staircase Smith didn’t know she had, a funky flight of brick and concrete that, once Knibb’s crew had dug it out, suddenly opened up her Beachwood Canyon hill.
“Here was structure from the past, a usable landscape remnant,” Knibb says. He quickly discovered other remnants, including part of a concrete wall and scraps of railroad ties he knew he could work into a new design. There were a few odd trees, too, such as a shaggy date palm, a silver olive, even a rubber tree that might have started life in a pot.
Not only did this mix of old materials suit Smith’s 1920s house, but it introduced a garden theme: layering textures and tones to bring a small, steep space alive.
“I wanted a garden I could use,” says Smith, a project manager for a landscape-design firm and mother of two young children who are frequently outside. “I asked for lawn, paths, eating and sitting places, but nothing formal or terribly studied.”
Knibb set out to re-create the feel of gardens from his childhood in Jamaica. “I didn’t so much see specific plants as imagine a sense of being enveloped in lush, contrasting greens with splashes of orange here and there,” he says.
His design for stair-step terraces was inspired by Indonesia, where landscapes follow natural contours of hills. “The land bends, you follow. You don’t fight it,” he explains. So instead of carving out static tiers, he invoked a series of what he calls “sliding curves that seem to move as you go up.” Strategically placed iron fencing with sinuous rails boosts the effect, as do dynamic plants such as grasses and artemisias mixed with starchier succulents and hydrangeas. By repeating these plants, along with complementary paving themes, Knibb connected the garden’s parts. And he enlarged its scope by constructing different ways to climb its hill.
Each offers its own surprises. Choose those old, original stairs, and you wade through artemisias to discover lettuce at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Approach from the right, via flagstones edged with thyme, and you find the outdoor dining room, complete with a whitewashed fir table and billowing scrim of ‘Iceberg’ roses. More flagstones lead between lavenders to a tucked-away bench, beyond which are the main stairs and a view of “the Crow’s Nest,” a pole arbor smothered in vines at the property’s summit. Up there, the big Hollywood panorama, which could previously only be seen in glimpses, unfolds.
“I sneak up for quick 20-minute rests,” Smith says. Whenever possible, she goes out to weed, prune and putter on her hill. “My last garden was about flowers. This one has a wilder spirit.”
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Resource Guide
Sean Knibb, Knibb Design Corp., Los Angeles, (310) 440-0101.
