Living Garden

When the lot next door came up for sale, the owners of a Malibu Beach, Calif., home were presented with an opportunity to double their living space. No, not with an addition to their house, but rather with a garden of outdoor rooms. The scheme devised by architects Richard Landry and Marc Welch of Landry Design Group for the 50-by-100-foot side lot creates essentially a second home, one right off the owners’ family room and open to the sun, sky, and Pacific Ocean view.

Designed as a series of rooms, the garden provides a place for big parties, intimate gatherings, and family dinners. The outdoor living room sits under a teak trellis that swoops over the seating area. The focus is a fireplace formed of stacked stone walls, granite slabs, and stacked glass. Those materials repeat throughout the garden. The al fresco dining room is right off the outdoor kitchen—a pizza oven built into a stucco wall and defined by stacked stone and glass sandwiched between slabs of granite.

At the bottom of the garden, the serpentine stucco wall curls into a nautilus-shaped sitting area centered on a fire pit. It’s encircled with the same stacked glass. The special low-iron-content glass reflects and enhances the visual effect of fire, says Landry, and echoes one of the owners’ favorite pieces of sculpture. The undulating wall gives shape to the garden and screens it from the house next door. A trellis that follows the wall forms a shady arcade and a good spot to set up for a party.

The garden is buffered by new street-side buildings that protect it from traffic noise and the view of passers-by and provide support facilities for the garden. The garage building houses a catering facility and upstairs gym. A smaller structure contains a powder room and storage.

While the “floor plan” of this yard is fairly elaborate, its “foundation” is even more so. With a steep slope down to the water and sandy soil conditions, the garden had to be constructed more than simply planted. In order to protect it from the effects of high tides and to meet local coastal regulations, the garden actually sits on a huge concrete slab that varies from 8 inches to 10 inches thick. The slab in turn is supported by 50 caissons that elevate it as much as 15 feet above the sand. Grass grows in 2 feet of soil on top of the slab, and trees and other large plants grow in wells that are 4 to 5 feet deep.

While its underpinnings are highly engineered, the garden’s design was inspired, more poetically, by the elements: The warmth of fire is in the fireplace, fire pit, and pizza oven. Water is encompassed by the Pacific view. The wind blows constantly off the water. “And,” Welch explains, “the structural element earth.”

Project Credits
Architect: Landry Design Group,West Los Angeles, Calif.
Builder: Quillin Construction, Los Angeles
Planting consultant: Art Luna, Los Angeles
Photographer: Erhard Pfeiffer
Illustration: Charles Lockhart