For some clients, a custom landscape is an afterthought, built with what's left of the budget and designed as a decorative backdrop to the house. Others are thinking ahead. They want their gardens to work hand-in-glove with the architecture, relating it to a series of discrete outdoor settings. H. Keith Wagner Partnership's clients fell squarely into the latter category. When they renovated their contemporary house in Colchester, Vt., they asked the Burlington landscape architecture firm to simultaneously design outdoor spaces that would intertwine the enlarged house and a detached garage/guestroom/dance studio.
The owners had purchased the plot not for the original house—an awkward saltbox shape—but for the view of Malletts Bay on Lake Champlain. The one-of-a-kind property meanders downhill to the rugged shoreline and empties into the lake. It's a peaceful place, but it's also strewn with large rock outcroppings, and shallow soils make planting and construction difficult. The new buildings were designed by architect Markus Link, a family friend, of the Munich-based firm Link Hocherl Architekten. Rather than almost doubling the house's bulk, he set the garage and dance studio a good 20 feet away and tethered it to the main house with a second-story bridge.
“The architecture extends into the landscape, hovering over the ground at times,” explains landscape architect Keith Wagner, who designed the surrounding gardens with former partner Melissa McCann. “The whole concept was to blend the house and studio into the rugged site as much as possible and let them be two simple architectural forms floating in nature.”
The clients' outdoor requests were fairly simple: an auto court, a formal lawn overlooking the lake, and a separate backyard area where their two young daughters could play. Wagner and McCann gave them a carefully orchestrated series of destinations set into masses of indigenous plantings. Metal garage doors painted bright orange beckon visitors down a honey-colored crushed gravel driveway that snakes around three maple trees and past embedded rocks. The rocks are softened with native plants such as ferns and Virginia creeper.
Near the house, a delicate scrim of river birches is planted in front of two poured concrete walls that define an edge of the auto court. The birches are a play on the thin wood struts—abstracted tree trunks—the architect applied to the house and garage. Behind the birches, a stepped ramp rises through the dappled shade of honey locusts to the house's front door. Constructed of steel and ipe, each platform is attached to a central I-beam that allows the ramp to “float” above the ground.
Throughout the project, the landscape architects made liberal use of stone that came from the site. The gravel driveway narrows to a walkway before spilling under the bridge between house and studio and around to the back of the house. “We had the idea that the landscape is a fluid thing working its way around the house and down to the river,” Wagner explains. Inset bands of light ochre limestone create a cadence along the walkway. Wagner calls it the stone datum walk, an abstraction of a dry river bed with a border of blasted rock from the construction site. The walkway ends behind the house, where more flat stones define a stepped terrace outside the back door and large upright rocks provide a perch for sunning. Beyond the terrace, two concrete walls retain a flat lawn, which gives way to a curving swath of grass behind the studio where the kids play. From there, a staircase and a winding walkway connect the lawn areas to the lake below.
If coordinating home construction is a puzzle, building a parallel landscape added even more complexity—and time. The project took three years to complete, and the family chose to live in one bedroom for the duration. “They were extremely patient,” says Wagner, who worked with Anything Grows in Richmond, Vt., to construct the gardens. He adds that the most difficult aspect was coordinating all the subcontractors. As the house's foundation went in, so did the rear lawn's retaining walls. With so much blasting and other site work necessary, Wagner and McCann might have been tempted to design as they went along. But they never deviated from the original concept, and its clarity shows. The restrained plantings—the low, swirling carpets of chartreuse grasses, the mottled river birch trunks rising out of crushed gravel—are a lesson in modernist simplicity. There are no pots of flowers, no sculptures or fancy garden furniture to detract from the beauty of the rocky site.
“The clients were a young couple who were completely into this sculptural landscape,” Wagner says. “They never second-guessed it.”—Cheryl Weber is a writer in Lancaster, Pa.
Project Credits: General contractor: Roundtree Construction, New Haven, Vt.; Architect: Link Hocherl Architekten, Munich; Landscape architect: H. Keith Wagner Partnership, Burlington, Vt.; Photographer: Westphalen Photography; Illustrator: Harry Whitver.
