There are gardening books that tell us what to plant and where. And there are architectural design books that tell us how our homes should look. But never the twain seem to meet. At least not until recently, when the two spaces — home and garden — wed harmoniously in the new book, “Outside the Not So Big House” by Sarah Susanka and Julie Moir Messervy.
“We tend to think of the house and the garden as isolated things,” Susanka says. “The sense of home is more than the building. There’s a way to shape the place that affects how you feel about home. It’s about creating a sense of path and flow that ties the inside to the outside.”
“Outside the Not So Big House” (Taunton Press, 216 pages, $34.95) is the sixth book for Susanka, an architect whose popular series of “Not So Big House” design books (www.notsobighouse.com) was spurred by her reaction to the growing num-bers of super-size trophy houses, which she says generally are not designed to fit the way most people live or to the scale and proportion of the human form.
Messervy is a landscape architect known for her design of the Toronto Music Garden in Toronto, a collaboration with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and for her Zen-inspired book, “The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning” (Little, Brown and Co., out of print).
The new book is inspiration for professionals and homeowners who need to think a little more outside the phlox. “It’s not a garden book and it’s not a landscape how-to book,” Messervy says. “In its most essential form, it’s about linking things together — path and place — to make a journey.”
That particular road trip usually involves an architect and a landscape designer who often travel different directions trying to get to the same destination. “The landscape person is not necessarily trained in architecture and doesn’t have the confidence and experience to work from the inside out,” Messervy says. “And similarly, architects don’t have the feel for landscape. They’ll put a box on land and call it a day.”
In the ideal world, the two professions work hand-in-hand, she says. They consider ways to site a new house or a home addition to take advantage of the sun and to enhance or screen the views. They position doors, windows, porches, patios and pergolas to integrate the interior and exterior spaces so they are perceived and lived in as one space. And they work together to repeat materials, shapes, colors, textures and details found in the house, out in the garden.
Among the 20 sites featured in the book is the former Oak Park home and garden of landscape designer Rosalind Reed who recently moved to Chicago.
Reed and her husband, Howard Walker, bought the Prairie-style house 15 years ago. “The property looked onto a school and there was an ugly fence everywhere you looked, and a deck with an ugly patio,” says Reed, who also served as a judge in the Chicago Tribune’s Glorious Gardens Contest in 1999.
The view from inside was unappealing and the space was not inviting, especially for a couple who likes to entertain in a garden setting. “If my dinner guests feel like they’re camping, it takes away from the experience,” Reed says.
And to make matters worse, neighboring houses looked onto Reed’s property making the back yard feel like a fishbowl until she designed two terraces and sunk the patio, surrounding the space with trees, shrubs and perennials.
The result was an attractive, cozy great room — outside.
“She’s choreographed this beautiful journey and it’s very subliminal,” Messervy says. “It’s the events along the way — like the sound of water — that make it enjoyable. It’s so important to the way you live.”
Room with a view
A clay oven, table and chairs, and “walls” created by lattice panels and evergreens transformed the box of grass into a secluded getaway, sheltered from the school behind them. Just a few feet from the kitchen, the patio is an easy destination in good weather and an attractive focal point from indoors all year.
The 15-inch-tall retaining wall has concrete blocks that blend with the color of the house, while the red bricks and gravel tie the patio and terraces together as a carpet would indoors. A screened house, which allowed the couple to enjoy the garden during poor weather or on buggy days, was placed on an angle to soften views of bright colored siding on an adjacent house.
“If your eye can’t go out — I would see my neighbor’s house or driveway or the school — you make your eye go in,” Reed says. In her garden, eyes were drawn to plants that cascade over the retaining wall, to colorful tropical plants in large containers and to nearby weeping specimen trees.
Large stepping stones lead the way through a side yard into the front garden where Reed replaced the lawn with a circular bed of annuals and perennials.
A winding, red gravel path surrounds the voluptuous planting. Four tall columnar pines, along with ornamental trees, shrubs and ground covers, screen street traffic. The front garden — once a square of turf — now mirrors the experience of a living room with walls, pathway, seating, accessories and entry points.
Messervy gives Reed high points for connecting the streetside space with the sides and back of the house. “I love Roz’s house with those crazy yellow columns. She takes over the front yard and almost makes it like a back yard. It’s her personal work of art and an expression of who she is.”
A broad brick path leads visitors from the street, around the circular bed and through the garden courtyard past plants, benches and small focal points, such as a turquoise blue pot, slowing the pace to the front door. A magnolia, with its lower branches removed, leans over a path to act as a doorway. And the soothing sounds of water beckon as strollers pass from one basin to another.
“I wanted to be able to walk through the garden,” Reed says. “It wasn’t in keeping with everyone else’s yard, but it was in keeping for me.” And that makes the journey worthwhile.
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4 ways to wed house and garden
1. The site
“Look how the house nestles into the landscape around it,” Julie Moir Messervy says. “Imagine the house has fallen forward onto its facade. The imprint it would make is usually the right amount of space needed for a terrace, patio, a gar-den or lawn.”
2. The flow
Create transitions between indoors and out by connecting outdoor rooms with inviting pathways that lead from a doorway to a resting spot, such as a bench, or to a deck or patio.
3. The frames
Frames are structures that surround or enclose a space. “If you’re sitting in your kitchen eating area, what are you looking out onto?” asks Sarah Susanka. The view should “give your eye a place to rest.” You might look out onto a path that invites you to come walk through the garden or it can be a focal point, like a piece of sculpture. Framing the landscape with walls, fences or hedges creates outdoor rooms that can mimic indoor rooms.
4. The details
Emphasize the interplay of materials, echoing forms and patterns to bring consistency to the whole. This might include repeating house colors in a planting palette, or using the same type or color of brick, stone or wood used on the house in elements of the garden, such as pergolas, arbors, decks or patios. An arbor that serves as a doorway over a path might mirror the shape of an exterior foyer roof.
— Nina A. Koziol
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READER CONNECTION
Would you like to learn more about how to marry house and garden so they live comfortably ever after?
Attend “Design and Site: Making the Marriage Work in a Residential Landscape,” a symposium from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. March 17 at the Bennett-Gordon Hall at Ravinia Festival, 200-231 Ravinia Park Rd., Highland Park. Cost: $149. Sponsored by the School of the Chicago Botanic Garden. 847-835-8261.
www.chicagobotanic.org/symposia.
Or learn more about Sarah Susanka, Julie Moir Messervy and Rosalind Reed online at:
(Sarah Susanka) www.notsobighouse.com
(Julie Moir Messervy) www.juliemoirmesservy.com
(Rosalind Reed) www.rosalindreed.com
