I love this front yard.
It’s a homey essay in formality. There’s not even a nod to the Landscape tradition -- with its asymmetries and allusions to acreage and scenery -- which is now the conventional way to design suburban front yards.
Geometry, in this garden, is put to use to mark out the incremental transition from the public street to the private house: from street, to sidewalk, over the little wall, across the lawn, up the steps, and onto the porch. The layers of increasing privacy are set out as a row of parallel horizontals. Then the walk penetrates straight through them to the front door.
All the details are just right. The little cobblestone wall is inspired. The lawn lays in a quiet expanse. The paired clumps of sedum, hosta and Alberta spruce are enough to mark the path. Russell Page wrote about a garden in Norfolk where a geometrical axis was “sketched” onto the featureless terrain with four pairs of simple wooden gates. “The most desirable quality of garden design…” he said about this sketched quality. And here too the modest geometry is becoming. Formality need not aspire to the grand manner.
And the porch is good. It’s deep enough and set high and tucked back into the body of the house. You could sit on it quietly and go unobserved from the sidewalk. That’s what makes a good porch.
It’s a homey essay in formality. There’s not even a nod to the Landscape tradition -- with its asymmetries and allusions to acreage and scenery -- which is now the conventional way to design suburban front yards.
Geometry, in this garden, is put to use to mark out the incremental transition from the public street to the private house: from street, to sidewalk, over the little wall, across the lawn, up the steps, and onto the porch. The layers of increasing privacy are set out as a row of parallel horizontals. Then the walk penetrates straight through them to the front door.
All the details are just right. The little cobblestone wall is inspired. The lawn lays in a quiet expanse. The paired clumps of sedum, hosta and Alberta spruce are enough to mark the path. Russell Page wrote about a garden in Norfolk where a geometrical axis was “sketched” onto the featureless terrain with four pairs of simple wooden gates. “The most desirable quality of garden design…” he said about this sketched quality. And here too the modest geometry is becoming. Formality need not aspire to the grand manner.
And the porch is good. It’s deep enough and set high and tucked back into the body of the house. You could sit on it quietly and go unobserved from the sidewalk. That’s what makes a good porch.
Nothing fancy plantwise. No showing off. No allusions to imagined topography or lifestyle. No pretense of any kind, but this garden has everything it needs for a modest house to sit on the street with composure and dignity.
2 comments:
That house is absolutely beautiful. The proportions are so perfect; it is able to be grand and totally lacking pretense. And it doesn't look designed at all. It just looks like 100 decisions were made over 50 years with nothing but practicality as the guide. For people who are sometimes called on to create instant flashy showmanship, it is a humbling reminder of what really works in the end
BY the way...where is this handsome house?
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