Beth Chatto, the late, pioneering plantswoman who convinced us to find the right plant for the right place, would have been 100 this year. Here, those who were influenced by her reflect on her lasting legacy. Among gardeners, there was, and is, only one Beth. Over her long life, Beth Chatto achieved the highest accolades in horticulture and beyond, including ten successive Chelsea Gold medals and an OBE. She wrote a string of best-selling books based on her experience of growing at her famous garden, and opened the first nursery to offer plants for specific conditions. This year marks the […]

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Dove le foreste di querce e sequoie si affacciano sulla scogliera rocciosa del Pacifico, i paesaggisti di Ground Studio disegnano sofisticati eden vegetali. In bilico tra il genius loci e le esigenze di un ecosistema in crisi Sfumare la distinzione tra architettura e paesaggio. Alternare linee nette e superfici morbide, inquadrature di prossimità e di orizzonte. Bilanciare il carattere del luogo e lo stile di vita delle persone che vi abitano. È questa l’ottica con cui Ground Studio Landscape Architecture (con sede a Monterey) opera in particolare nella magnifica area naturalistica del Big Sur e nell’entroterra californiano. Un approccio ecosistemico […]

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Un giardino virtuoso Un mix di graminacee, erbacee e arbusti autoctoni o provenienti dal Mediterraneo, dal Sud Africa e dalla Nuova Zelanda e di succulente caratterizza un giardino progettato da Bernard Trainor a Big Sur per contrastare la siccità Un approccio progettuale che tiene conto del clima e del suo cambiamento e delle logiche del luogo si è fatto strada de tempo negli studi di progettazione del paesaggio e del giardino del mondo. In California, come in altre regioni dove il clima arido (e inaridente) e i cicli di siccità sono una realtà, i paesaggisti stanno reinventando il modo di […]

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Dove volano le farfalle Bernard Trainor è l’autore di un grande giardino in sintonia con l’architettura moderna di Feldman Architecture e lo spirito del paesaggio naturale dell’entroterra californiano Apochi chilometri nell’entroterra di Carmel-by-the- Sea, in California, Santa Lucia Preserve è un complesso privato di poco più di 8.000 ettari di natura incontaminata all’interno di una riserva. Un paesaggio quanto mai vario, attraversato da colline, torrenti, vallate e pianure con una vegetazione autoctona ricca e variegate e una fauna selvatica, che la comunità si impegna a preservare e valorizzare: solo il 10 per cento della Preserve è edificabile, il resto è […]

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A Fresh Point of View When a talented Southern California landscape designer was tasked with creating a garden for this jaw-dropping setting in Big Sur, he knew there was no competing with its beauty. Instead, he complemented it, taking cues from the coastal home’s natural surroundings and selecting a mix of natives and hardy plants originating from similar ecosystems around the world that would enhance, not overtake, the rugged locale. The result is a textural feast of billowy grasses, pert succulents, and occasional vivid blooms that look like they’ve flourished here all along. West Coast landscape designer Bernard Trainor doesn’t […]

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POINT BREAK Feldman Architecture and Commune Design collaborate on a soulful Santa Cruz beach house for a family with surfing in their blood. At the heart of this tale about a serene, sophisticated family getaway in Santa Cruz, California, there’s a tree. Actually, a kind of tree—the Monterey cypress, a species native to the state’s central and northern coast. First, and most obviously, there’s the lovely specimen that presides over the home’s clifftop site, hovering above a stretch of world-class surf breaks and scenic beaches. And then there are the various cypresses that were marshaled into service by Feldman Architecture […]

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BIG SKIES High on a hillside on the rugged Californian coast, designer Bernard Trainor harnesses sweeping views to create a stunning space for lovers of the great outdoors. High up on a ridge, along the rugged stretch of coastal California known as Big Sur, an intriguing, glass-fronted house perches over a singular, south-facing garden. This unique position affords an eye-popping panorama, taking in everything from the Santa Lucia Mountains in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. Seeing these changes of terrain in one view is like “having two pages of a book open at the same time,” […]

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FORCE OF NATURE The flora comes first at a leafy enclave just minutes from downtown Palo Alto. Recently retired and ready to downsize, Paul and Melonie Brophy found a lot in Palo Alto that gave them the chance to start fresh. Their glass, concrete, and wood house, designed by Feldman Architecture, seems to float above a landscape by Bernard Trainor. Of the board-formed concrete wall, architect Taisuke Ikegami says, “It connects the building to the ground place while allowing the house to be a landscape element.” The house was a “fall-down,” the lot long neglected. But as soon as Paul […]

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HOME FRONT In his private garden in California, designer Bernard Trainor explores new plants and possibilities. Though he has now settled in the USA, and comes originally from Australia, landscape designer. Bernard Trainor began to develop his core ideas about plants and place in Britain. As a young horticultural apprentice, he came to the UK to work with the late, great Beth Chatto, and his experience in her Essex garden was life changing. “I’d thought about planting for climate before, but working with Beth cemented those ideas,” he says. “She was also just the best person, with incredible values and […]

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Prairie House One of the guiding principles of California modernist architecture is that the built and natural landscapes relate. When Bernard Trainor, one of the Bay Area’s leading landscape designers, visited a 20-acre Sonoma County vineyard, he saw terrain that could be brought into perfect dialogue with the property’s new private home. The sleek, sculptural residence, designed by San Francisco’s Swatt I Miers Architects, was perched high upon a knoll, surrounded by majestic blue oaks and pinot noir vineyards. Trainor and his firm created a dynamic landscape in which hardscaping and softscaping intersect, artfully framing the modernist structure. Here, stone […]

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Between the Lines Positioned on the San Andreas Fault just east of Monterey Bay is a 500-acre walnut tree ranch distinguished by dramatic forested hills, a bubbling creek and a smattering of old distressed barns and small cabins originally built for the ranch hands. Also nestled into that landscape is a more recent addition designed by architect Jonathon Feldman–a spacious modern home constructed of rammed earth, steel and concrete. “Our clients were excited about having a property that was both a family retreat and a working ranch,” Feldman says, noting that the owners grow organic walnuts, olives and grapes along […]

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Natural High High above Carmel Valley beside rugged Halls Ridge, a Southern California family has created a rustic retreat in the embrace of ancient California live oaks and madrones. Anchored by massive sheltering bluestone walls, the superbly delineated residence- which has won several architectural design awards- opens to a shimmering pool to reveal miles of undulating hills in this remote and pristine terroir. Crafted in the cedar and reclaimed barnwood, this mountain escape is a modernist update of the California farm building vernacular, designed as a frame for the landscape. The Santa Lucia Preserve where it’s located (Big Sur is […]

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Natural Response In Carmel’s Santa Lucia Preserve, a modern structure offers a welcoming respite for its Texas family with clean lines, open spaces and a host of warm materials that speak to its site. There is a huge community of Texans who have settled in Carmel because of the weather,” observes interior designer Kristin Rowell. It was a Texas couple with three children, in fact, who asked Rowell to appoint the interiors of the vacation home they were building in the Santa Lucia Preserve, an exclusive golf and equestrian community with homes on 2,000 acres of an otherwise undeveloped 20,000-acre […]

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Simplicity Of Line Award-winning architects Swatt | Miers conjure a private Silicon Valley residence that embodies effortless elegance. They have done it again. The team from Swatt | Miers has been on a veritable roll for the past 20 years crafting homes and commercial buildings that express a crisp, contemporary point of view that places the utmost value on beauty, sustainability, and user responsiveness. The wonderful private home on these pages is a prime example of what this firm does so well. Notes Bob Swatt, “Our clients discovered this property in Atherton with marvelous mature trees and brought us in […]

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On a sunny, windy spring day, with the California hills already brown after a nearly rainless winter, Bernard Trainor, ASLA, leads the way up a winding driveway to a ridgetop house with no other houses in sight. He points out what the cut for the drive has exposed—virtually no topsoil, just a thin filling of tan, sandy soil coating rocks packed as densely as the nuts in a Baby Ruth candy bar. “The soil is so poor and the weather so extreme that this is what you get,” he says, indicating a “pygmy forest” of stunted, windblown oaks. This is […]

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