Must a window box always look like a humdrum shoe box? Sure, it’s primarily a vessel for flowers and foliage, but can’t it stand to have a little personality of its own?
That’s half the challenge we put to three Chicago designers. Make a window box that is beautiful both with and without plants in it. The other half: Make it something that any ordinary person can duplicate without first running out to pick up a degree in art or woodworking.
The designers we tapped are Luis Caicedo, whose plans for residential interiors, restaurants and other spaces always incorporate materials he has found on trash-picking expeditions; Dick Gorman, an architect and furniture designer whose tastes run to the sleek lines of Modernism; and Amy Meadows, who as visual merchandising manager for the Marshall Field’s State Street store dresses up the already ornate space for Flowering Field’s each spring, Christmas each fall, and assorted other occasions.
Although the trio’s styles have little in common, each designer had a ready affinity for the project: Meadows spends her winter and spring up to the eyeballs in container plants anyway; Gorman’s wife, Barbara, had been bugging him to make some interesting window boxes for their Oak Park home; and Caicedo–well, with all the time he spends fishing around in trash bins, he deserved a chance to smell something fresh for once.
To keep the project within reach of most gardeners, we put the designers on a budget. Caicedo couldn’t spend more than $50, Gorman $100 and Meadows $150 on the box itself, excluding plants and potting soil. Every one of the three came in under budget. None spent more than four hours on the project.
The assigned dimensions for the boxes were 7 1/2 inches high and deep, and 30 inches long, in line with the size of many plain-wrap window boxes.
All three finished boxes met both halves of the challenge masterfully.
Here’s the dirt on each designer’s experience.
Luis Caicedo
Above all, a Dumpster-diving designer must stay flexible.
“I went into the project looking for something classical, like a plaster lion’s head,” Caicedo says. “That didn’t work out, so I kept looking.”
As it turned out, his defining find wasn’t in a trash bin at all but stacked up on the curb waiting for him to drive by. A homeowner who had done a spring cleanup of the yard had neatly bundled and stacked twigs and lengths of vine and left them for the trash crew. Instead, Caicedo scooped them up and set about nailing, stapling and plastering the woody trash onto a plain box he had assembled from wood scraps in his basement.
On a previous treasure hunt, Caicedo had turned up a huge collection of old plastic grapes. Plucking two hefty bunches from his heap, he added them to the twigs and got a naturalistic look that’s part craftsman, part cheap Italian restaurant.
Sadly, Caicedo had to venture into a regular retail store to get the wooden balls that cap the corners of his window box and give it a formal, classical finish. They cost him $4; with the cost of paint, plaster and a few other materials, Caicedo spent just $10 to complete the project.
Expect the price to go up a bit if you’re wedded to the plastic-grape motif and don’t have the stomach to rifle trash bins in search of a supply. Plastic grapes are available for about $2.29 a bunch at craft stores.
Dick Gorman
“I’m a Modernist. I don’t like things to get too frou-frou and complicated for the sake of being complicated,” says Gorman, who runs the River North furniture gallery Manifesto with his wife, Barbara. His slatted window box adheres to that guideline very carefully, allowing only the merest hint of frou-frou in the sensuous curve that runs across its front.
Almost invisible to somebody standing straight in front of the box, the curved form has a function. “It makes the box look a little different when you move around the corner,” he says.
He plans to build a few more just like the first and set them in a row of windows to create an undulating effect.
Most of Gorman’s furniture designs are in natural wood, and he initially expected to finish the poplar box he built with mahogany stain. He ran into two problems, one aesthetic and the other practical. In a dark color, the slats didn’t “pop” as much as he wanted, instead blending in with the dark spaces between. He needed white for the contrast.
The other problem was that he had a heck of a time getting stain in between the slats. He figures a more experienced woodworker would have known to finish the wood before building.
Gorman spent less than $40: $14 for a 1-inch-by-8-inch-by-6-foot strip of poplar; $18 for two pieces that were 1-inch-by-4-inch-by-6-feet; and another $4.79 for a can of spray enamel paint.
Shaping the curve is the only tricky part of Gorman’s blueprint for a new window box. He drew one he liked freehand, then enlarged it on a photocopy machine and traced the enlargement onto one slat. After cutting the first slat’s curve on a band saw, he used it as the mold, holding it atop each uncut piece to guide it through the saw and get uniform cuts.
For people without the drawing or sawing skills that step requires, Gorman has some advice: Buy a “flexible curve” in a drafting-supply store and use it to create a good line; trace a curve you like in a magazine or household object; or do without the curve and customize the box with your own flourish, such as making each slat longer than the one below, resulting in more of a basket than a box.
Aside from making the curve, he says, the construction process is simple. He cut the 1-by-8 into strips 1 1/2 inches wide and 30 inches long, and the 1-by-4 into strips an inch wide by 7 1/4 inches long. He then stacked the pieces log-cabin style, gluing and nailing each layer to the one below and clamping the finished project overnight while the glue dried.
Amy Meadows
Don’t try this at home: Because she wanted to use some Marshall Field’s merchandise in her window box, Meadows dropped by the store’s fine china department and picked out five plates she liked, worth a total of $60. Then she smashed them into little pieces.
“You don’t have to break brand new china,” Meadows notes. “If you have a favorite vase or plate that breaks, you can work it into a mosaic instead of throwing it out. Or pick some plates up at flea markets.”
Field’s carpentry staff built a wooden box and edged it with half-round molding to create a picture area on the front. Then Meadows sat down with all her shards and laid out a mosaic whose colors suggest soil, bugs and new sprouts.
Plywood extensions in the shapes of flowers above the back of the box extend the mosaic outside the picture frame.
Meadows spent $60 for china and another $30 on tile scraps to round out her palette, and used another $30 for wood, tile adhesive and grout. She spent four hours on the box. The total price of $120 would go up, but construction time would go down, if she had bought a ready-made wooden window box.
The pieces of china and beads are attached to the plywood with a standard bathroom-tile adhesive, and the spaces in between are filled with stock grout.
Ready, set, plant
If your window box is getting a new look, maybe the plants in it should too. Reach beyond the tried-and-true geraniums and vinca vines for some of these striking plants recommended by Mark Maradik, a plant manager at Pasquesi Home and Farm Suppliers in Lake Forest.
For full sun
– Gazania rigens. Big, bold daisies with silvery foliage, many gazanias have stark color contrasts or black stripes on the same flower.
– Cuphea hyssopifolia, or Mexican false heather. Its dense mass of tiny, waxy leaves and fingernail-size white or violet flowers make it a dramatic window box plant.
– Ipomoea Batatas “Blackie.’ This sweet potato vine’s star-shape, black-purple leaves trail lazily over the sides of a window box. Although related to morning glories, the plant rarely flowers.
– Brachycome iberidifolia. Swan River daisies bloom abundantly, hiding their lacy foliage with countless gold-centered white blooms.
For shade
Fuchsia hybrids. Not unfamiliar to Chicago gardeners but usually displayed in large hanging baskets, fuchsias grace window boxes well with their pendulous flowers in torrid color combinations.
