The Green Room

NATURE’S DINING ROOM

Los Angeles landscape designer Scott Shrader spent three years looking at more than 300 houses before finding his 1940 Hollywood Regency-style home in West Hollywood’s “Norma Triangle.” Bordering Beverly Hills, the neighborhood is composed of modest ‘20s and ‘30s bungalows, many of which were transformed in the late ‘50s into mansard-roofed Empire-style dwellings. “Essentially they designed estate-like homes on tiny lots maximizing every square inch,” says Shrader, who was drawn to the 1,600-square-foot home because of its high ceilings and light-filled living room, which opened onto a back garden.

But the garden needed work. Initially the brick-paved backyard lay 3 1/2 feet below the level of the house. A row of dead cypress trees and three run-down fences surrounded the yard. It took a week of demolition to remove the brick hardscape and two additional concrete patios. What remained was a long, narrow 24-by-45-foot open space. “The first thing I did was add structure,” explains Shrader. He constructed a 3-foot-high masonry wall around the yard’s perimeter. Seven truckloads of soil helped to bring the garden to the same level as the house, “making the house seem much larger than it is.” He then divided the yard into three defined spaces, each corresponding to a room inside so that each has its own private garden. The central patio--just outside the living room--where he reads, dines and talks on the phone, he calls “the best ‘room’ in the house.” Flanking the central garden space, two smaller outdoor rooms (18 feet by 24 feet and 14 feet by 24 feet) off the den and guest bedroom function as a dining room and bar area, respectively, when Shrader entertains. “I’ve had as many as 60 people here. They flow easily from one garden room to another,” he says. “Dividing the space created a more architecturally interesting environment. It also adds a bit of mystery.”

Shrader fashioned “walls” for the outdoor rooms by planting 85 6-foot-high Ficus nitida. Two years after planting, the now 12-foot-tall hedge walls around the perimeter of the garden are as high as his mansard roof, while shorter 8-foot-high hedges mark side walls. Under the 200-year-old Guatemalan pavers, which are set in sand, are underground soaker hoses that slowly irrigate the garden. “You have to be careful about over-watering ficus,” he warns. “They’ve very susceptible to fungus.”

The central garden’s focal point is a bronze-trimmed pool filled with waterlilies, which surround Simon Toparovsky’s “Icarus” sculpture. Antique stone pavers and French limestone posts from a 17th century castle flank openings to each room, adding a patina of age to the 3-year-old garden. “I love to come outside when everything is looking great,” says Shrader. And the designer takes a hands-on approach to keeping his garden manicured. For the first two years he trimmed the ficus with Felco clippers--normally used for cutting roses. He still hand-trims the hedges but now uses a longer, 12-inch blade. “It’s the old-fashioned European way of cutting that gives you a tight, concise, straight hedge,” he explains. “I sometimes go out and tell the ficus how great they are. They’re like my babies.”

--BARBARA THORNBURG

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Styled by Michele Adams / Marnie Rose Agency LLC

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THE CRASH PAD

“My sultan’s playroom, my flying carpet,” designer Jay Griffith calls the covered lounge he built on a Malibu hill overlooking the Pacific. His impetus? “Getting out of the sun,” he says. “I needed shelter, but I couldn’t sacrifice openness.”

Having surveyed his rolling 4 1/2-acre property, he chose a weedy midpoint he describes as “halfway through the soliloquy, the pause between stanzas.” There, with assorted bits of scrap plywood, he hammered out a 20-by-40-foot enclosure on a piece of raised redwood decking. For a semi-transparent roof and one billowing wall, he hung up bamboo shades, and to ground his structure, he added hay bales on either side. These, he says, together with reflecting ponds made of horse troughs, relate to “Malibu’s agrarian soul. This is the country, not the city. It demands the architecture of a barnyard.”

In a similarly casual spirit, he painted his lounge with a mix of leftover odds and ends of stain. “Take a bunch of paint in every color, throw it together, you get this,” he observes, “the color of ragged-out sage or chaparral.”

He scavenged most of his furnishings, too: a pair of king-size mattresses from a Venice curb, Army surplus canvas for upholstery, cushions excavated from a sale bin in a garden store. As you rest your head, wind rattles the surrounding pepper trees and bamboo. If you’re hungry, there’s a gas grill nearby--and a complete dinner service for 12 (plates, napkins, stemware, cutlery) in sealed Lucite drawers.

Griffith, for whom garden buildings are often temporary and changeable, entertains here often, holding Saturday night salons after which guests sometimes fall asleep--in the outdoor boudoir. Says Griffith, “It becomes a beach-side crash pad, circa 1966.”

--SUSAN HEEGER

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Styled by Michele Adams / Marnie Rose Agency LLC

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INSPIRED RECYCLING

One wall of Sloane and Greg Mann’s garden dining room is dark oak trees. Another is a sunstruck row of potted cypresses, slim and widely spaced, a suggestive edge rather than a real screen. In the same way, the 16-by-25-foot room is more a gracefully sketched space than an enclosure, a comment about imposing order lightly on the land. A simple pergola of redwood posts topped with slats evokes the room, which they conceived and constructed themselves, furnishing it with a table that Greg designed around recycled tile fragments. At the room’s far end is a brick fireplace that dates to the 1940s, when the couple’s Altadena cottage was built on the ruins of an earlier house destroyed by fire.

Adjoining the fireplace was a cracked cement patio, the remnant of a garden gathering spot. Otherwise, jade plants, ivy and trumpet vines ran rampant across their three-quarters of an acre, and they had to remove a medley of bird-seeded trees when they bought the cottage four years ago. As they cleared and trimmed around the patio, they found the oak trees, which formed a scrim that set off the ridge of mountains in the background.

Here, motivated by a party they had promised to host in honor of Greg’s father’s retirement, they went to work, setting slate atop the concrete, raising the redwood posts and crowning them with a hollow steel frame they could thread with conduits for lights. Even the old fireplace needed attention: Ivy had pulled apart its bricks, which required restoration by a mason. After nailing slats on the pergola’s roof, they planted a sweet autumn clematis nearby, which will eventually drape the structure in blooms each fall. “That’s the nicest time here,” say Sloane and Greg, both graphic designers and passionate chefs who like to stoke the fire at a moment’s notice and invite a dozen of their friends. A sample menu? Chicken sausages, pork chops grilled on a bed of lavender and truffle mashed potatoes.

--S.H.

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THE CONTEMPORARY TENT

With its aluminum-trellis frame, sloping roof and canvas walls, Tina Beebe and Buzz Yudell’s poolside shelter resembles a large, comfortable tent. By day, when its ochre curtains (made of sun- and mildew-resistant fabric) are tucked back, you can see across the pool to a rose border and a swath of ocean beyond. After dark, with the drapes snapped closed against the onshore winds and the mounted landscape lights burning inside, the tent glows like a lantern in the night.

“I’ve always loved tents. I grew up going to summer camp and sleeping in tents with wood floors,” recalls Beebe, an architectural colorist who designed the Malibu house and pool pavilion with her architect husband, a principal in the Santa Monica firm Moore Ruble Yudell Architects and Planners. The pavilion, she says, is “also a translation of the old-fashioned sleeping porch, a place to nap in the heat and keep warm and protected later, when the breeze blows up.”

Anchored by stucco columns that match those of their house, the simple 9-by-27-foot structure is surrounded by fragrant honeysuckle, lemon verbena and various sages in addition to English and old roses. The focus of the garden tent, Beebe says, is relaxing, though the couple has had dinner parties there. Hence the furnishings: cushioned chairs, small tables you can sling your feet on, and plenty of cushions.

--S.H.

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A POOLSIDE PERCH

Six years ago, Pasadena designer Matthew White was lucky enough to acquire a pool pavilion when he bought his 1924 Mediterranean-style house. Designed in the mid-1980s by Pasadena landscape architect Mark Berry, who also designed the pool, the tile-roofed guest house had a ready-made 20-by-9-foot lounging spot in the shade of its tall columns. An outdoor fireplace warms this poolside perch at night, while built-in limestone-topped counters surround a barbecue, refrigerator and sink that come in handy for garden dining. The limestone terrace floor, impervious to wet feet, flows directly into the guest house, enhancing the indoor-outdoor connection.

But to make the area even more summer-friendly, White fitted the covered terrace with canvas awnings, which can be extended in the noon heat and retracted later to reveal the sky. In the interest of comfort, when friends arrive he raids the pool house for wood folding tables and upholstered chairs covered in cotton that won’t be harmed by damp swimsuits.

“The main house is rather formal,” White acknowledges. “Here we can hang around in shorts, barbecue and feel totally part of the garden. Since this part is enclosed by tall trees--crape myrtle, orange, eucalyptus and palm--you have the sense of an outdoor room-within-a-room.”

His favorite time is evening, when the trees, lit with landscape lights, shimmer in the pool’s watery mirror. “It’s completely private and protected here,” he notes. “You’ve got the feeling of shelter, but you can look out and enjoy the world.”

--S.H.

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WHAT’S COOKING

For Beverly Hills interior designer Sandy Koepke, having a small house was reason enough to build an outdoor dining room and kitchen. More to the point, she says, “I’d rather be outside than inside--cooking, eating, entertaining. That’s why I live in this climate.” Yet when she bought her house five years ago, she was reluctant to plunk appliances in the garden, an act she calls “an inappropriate invasion of nature.”

Her solution, inspired by her find of two 8-by-10-foot leaded windows at an estate sale, was to construct a secluded garden room with the look of an old greenhouse--vine-walled, rose-roofed but open to the breezes. Located off her indoor dining room and accessible through glass doors, the 21-by-16-foot space was conceived as an extension of the house that would draw guests out with soft lights, the sound of a fountain, potted plants and plenty of seating. And just beyond this green enclosure would be an outdoor living room. “I designed these the way I’d design an indoor space,” Koepke says, describing the extensive concrete foundation she needed to support her dining room’s steel frame and also to contain power, gas and water lines for lighting and cooking. The room’s gravel floor, along with the vines, French bistro chairs and barn lights, suggests informal South of France living. The kitchen, tucked discreetly into one end, features a gas grill with extra side burners, a copper cold-water sink and a fabric skirt that hides storage shelves. There is no refrigerator. “I put drinks in a tub of ice,” she explains. “It’s not meant to be high-tech.”

In fact, to give the steel frame a rustic look of age, she coated it with paint containing iron filings before planting the bougainvillea, trumpet vine and ‘Graham Thomas’ roses that complete its walls.

--S.H.