Sometimes everything has to follow one theme. Sometimes, not so much. This design created transitions between outdoor rooms, each with its own character.
Arrive, entertain, relax
Arrival
The entire front, including the home’s façade and garage door, got a redo.
The biggest issue was that once you were in the entry patio, you were basically inside the house with floor to ceiling windows running the length of the patio.
The solution was a series of transition walls to create a sense of increasing privacy, arriving at a locked door with an intercom. No more uncontrolled access!
Entertain
Once through the patio entry door, you’re surrounded by an outdoor kitchen and dining patio sheltered by a Japanese maple and metal shade structure. There’s a kinetic fountain/sculpture in a pocket of green, ground treatments enrich the spaces, including decorative metal drains that lead to a groundwater infiltration system in the front.
With the home’s doors open, this space becomes another room.
Back yard
Swimming pool
A small dipping pool with a raised bond beam takes up most of the back yard, with a vegetable garden in colorful stucco raised planters filling in a sunny space.
The pool is backed by a wall that happens to hide the pool equipment area, effectively making it vanish. The wall is a good noise barrier, too.
Meditation – Zen garden
Another change in character, using a grove of bamboo to wrap around a small patio accented with Asian sculptures. A home office looks onto this tranquil area.
Utility space
Built-in storage and a potting bench run along the wall outside the garage in a mostly hidden location. This is where all the messy things happen so that the rest of the landscape remains pristine.
Lessons
- Doing the façade and the landscaping at the same time brings up several opportunities. In this case, the driveway’s concrete scoring was aligned with the garage door panels. It also let us add the controlled access entry gate as part of an extended wall of the house.
- We wanted to keep the Japanese maple, but we also needed a privacy wall just behind it. The other walls were concrete block, with footings. Putting a footing mere feet away from the tree would have severed half its roots, so we used fence panels anchored on both sides to the concrete wall, eliminating the footing to leave the tree’s roots mostly undisturbed.
- This was the first time we really needed to model a design in 3D to fit the parts together. Counters, walls, overhead structure, gas grill, drainage, house, eaves… it was a real 3D jigsaw puzzle!
- This design was featured in the Modesto Architecture Festival (now MADWEEK). We gave a lecture, toured mid-century modern buildings and had a lot of fun. None of this led to more projects of this caliber. Lesson: just have fun, do a great design, and if something else happens, it happens. If not, well – we still had fun!
- A clever contractor can find interesting solutions. The inset lights in the front path were specified from a catalog, little cubes that glow. The contractor used glass block and regular in-ground lights to get the same effect using easier to source materials. Not quite the same but close enough. The underground groundwater infiltration drainage system was likewise done without the specified catalog cisterns.
- Specifying everything is good, even if it’s not used – it gives an idea of what we’re looking for and how it works, leaving the building team free to improvise along guidelines.
- Plants, not even clones, will grow uniformly unless sheared. For plants that can’t be attractively sheared, like New Zealand flax, it’s best to plant mixed varieties for a look that’s never uniform – so nobody will expect it to be.
- Using plain stucco walls that match the house makes the planting scheme more dominant and unifies the design. Fancier treatments were saved for where they’d have greater impact, like the patio floor and zen garden.
- Increasing wall heights as they move away from the street blend the structure into the design, so it doesn’t pop out and loom over anything else. This was tested in the 3D model, and we were happy to see that it worked in real life.