104 DIGS.NET
|
12.15.2017
Tasked with creating intimate spaces that still have a sense
of openness fell to KAA Design's Jerry Williams, a landscape
architect who used native and climate-appropriate
plantings that served both a practical and aesthetic
purpose. With the overall aim to tie all the elements
together in order to create environs of rich character,
Williams selected plants to provide that landscape color
and texture, with much of the vegetation edible. (Right off
the kitchen is a production garden for a boun of herbs
and vegetables for the house.)
"Creating individual spaces also was really important to
this project," Williams says. "e homeowners wanted
more intimate space." A lovely example is the sitting area
just off the husband's office; suspended over the hillside,
it seems to float, grounded only by a few spiky plants of
varying height. Discreetly placed plantings throughout
the landscape allow for quiet observation, a glass of wine.
e wife's green roofed office, however, with its perimeter
fringed in the grass also used over the garage, has a deck
with a firepit and chairs for a livelier gathering.
is proper also reaches out to the landscape with truly
striking architectural features, such as the concrete wall
festooned with spidery green growth that stretches across
the infini-edge pool, forming a portal through which
the pool can pass. Set slightly back from the pool, frozen
in dramatic repose, is a towering single palm tree. If in
the water, one looks below to find a patch of succulents. "A
secret garden," says Williams.
"One of the things you try to do in a home like this is
unveil the layers," says Tran, accounting for the way the
architecture slowly opens first to the tremendous vista,
then to all the beautiful pockets of earth, in one artfully
conceived embrace. ough placed in its hillside setting,
Tower Grove Drive feels entirely at home in this context,
as if it existed long before it was realized—an entirely
natural place to be.
