Liquid Assets
On paper, the Santa Monica acre had it all: swimming pool, guest cottage, tennis court, view and enough land to get lost in. In reality, it felt cramped, pedestrian and hard to use, full of small spaces that didn’t relate to each other or to the house, which the owners bought in 1996.
A large Mediterranean from the ‘20s, the house exuded historic charm. But even before a remodel by the architectural firm Rios Associates added a den, a children’s bedroom and other family-friendly features, it seemed to tower over its grounds and make their shortcomings obvious. “There was no mystery, nothing really to discover,” says Mark Tessier, a landscape designer who works for Rios and was involved in the garden’s transformation.
Despite ficus and magnolia trees, an entry court lacked a feeling of enclosure, and its plants--mostly ferns and camellias--seemed paltry beside the house. The rear yard was taken up with paving and an oddly angled 1960s pool. At the far edge, where the view of a golf course and parklands should have been, an ivy thicket blocked the way, and beyond that, the lot ended in a scrubby, overgrown hill.
In lieu of these bits and pieces, the design team--which included Tessier, Mark Rios and Carol Lowry--created a sequence of gardens with distinct yet related moods. In the front court, they built their scheme around existing plants, moving trees and adding more to tuck the house more firmly into landscape. At ground level, they planted dark-leafed acanthus, abutilon and philodendron among the ferns, with potted cannas and bergenias as accents. To enhance the feeling of a tropical glade, they revived an old fountain with fresh paint, replaced the tile around its base with sandstone flags and added baby’s tears, campanula and true geranium.
Liquid comfort is a larger theme in the new rear garden, where the designers swapped the ‘60s pool for a raised, mirror-like lap pool. Decorator Michael Smith, who did the home’s interiors, chose the tile and pool color, and set lanterns around its edge to light the water on summer nights. Nearby, more abutilons grow, but in this sunny spot, they’re paired with lavender, westringia and coppery dodonaea.
A newly planted tapestry wraps up the hill, unfolding along paths and stairs that Rios and his colleagues created. The idea, say the designers, was to pick colors from local hills--grays, oranges and blues--and mix them in seasonally shifting planting swaths. Westringia and dodonaea reappear, with purple echium in spring and orange lion’s tail and Mexican marigold in summer. Hillside terraces include vegetable and cutting gardens, too, as well as places to sit in the shade of trees.
The designers worked magic in other ways, transforming a service yard off the house into a lemon orchard, revamping an outdoor dining room and evoking drama with fragrant plants: wisteria, jasmine, potted heliotrope. Now, you really can get lost here, not only in sights and smells but in clues about what lies beyond each corner--a visual trick that could make the smallest garden seem endless.
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Resource Guide
GARDENS, Pages 20-25: Rios Associates, Los Angeles, (323) 852-6717; Michael S. Smith, Interior Design, Santa Monica, (310) 315-3018.
