Wild Charm | TERREMOTO

Natural, simple and unadorned.
自然、朴拙、真趣

Without grand narrative and various symbolic meanings such as site culture and social service, garden construction is a private landscape that walks outside all standards/dogmas and serves the individual. With personal aesthetic preferences as the only guideline, the daily landscape derived from time brewing often inspires the freest expression and the most vital emotional space.

01
木石小院
VINCE SKELLY’S GARDEN

TERREMOTO

The garden makes people feel more secure in their love for nature. What the designer presents in the garden of the private house is to draw simple wild interest from the uncontrollable nature where beauty and danger coexist, which we call “tamed nature, exquisite wild”, so as to make it more suitable for the real modern life, and touch the inner sense of human genes close to nature with the appearance of the original wilderness.

The seemingly opposite sides of refinement and simplicity blend harmoniously with real life here. Imperfect rustic materials can give people spiritual relaxation. Soil, stone, plants, hand-made wood carvings, local natural materials purify the mind and soothe the soul. At the same time, the layout between them echoes and matches with plants, exquisite appearance and tone, and constructs exquisite art beyond life on nature.

Sunshine, breeze, rain and dew are ideal conditions that glow with all vitality, and human beings are no exception. To enjoy life in a place without a ceiling is an eternal pursuit that has not changed for thousands of years. The furniture and works of art that were common in the original interior broke through the barriers into the garden with the iteration of life, and the concept of “home” has since been a new extension.

Another important aspect of the garden is the degree of harmony between the building and the landscape, and to some extent the private house is also part of the garden. The building is located in the garden. The white low-profile one-story house hides the traces of modern construction to the greatest extent, eliminates the primary and secondary distinctions of stereotypes under the cover of tall plants, and shows the harmonious beauty of coexistence between man and nature.

02
森林浮舟
EDGEWICK

TERREMOTO

Before the site intervention, almost no one was willing to set foot in any corner of the land, not only did there be no way down, there was no destination to look forward to. Then a forest path and a floating platform emerge quietly.

With sensory intuition and a sense of light intervention, a wooden walkway is laid from the house to the destination in the forest, both for humans and for other creatures in the forest and for rainwater infiltration. Sage and artemisia are planted on both sides, attracting small animals to walk freely on the unfenced walkway. Man and nature live in harmony and thus have a more concrete picture.

The seemingly grassy clutter around the wooden platform is actually a practice of planting both science and art – it took us two or three tries to figure out which plants were right for growing there. The canyon terrain here is unique and bizarre, with no beginning or end, and the sun conditions are fickle and unpredictable. We must humbly and carefully listen to feedback and follow nature’s inspiration.

03
青绿之境
COMMONWEALTH

TERREMOTO

Based on the modernist architectural tone of the house, the backyard is created to match the regular lines and wild planting. Structurally, a key fireplace is built in the corner of the garden to attract people to gather and interact with the garden, and a small wooden bridge in the middle breaks the plain layout and focuses the eye on the fireplace, which is not in the center, and contrasts the clear hard landscape with the natural relaxation of the plants.

It is worth mentioning that although California’s native plants have a reputation for being unkemp and dry, half of the plants in the garden are still sourced from the local area, no matter what season, it can still remain moist and vibrant, it can be said that the presentation of this garden has changed people’s wrong perception of California plants, and won everyone’s favor for native plants.

04
梦幻幽谷
ANZIO

TERREMOTO

Nestled in a lush green valley in Bel Air, a post-modern building tucked away in the mountains is a gem with a variety of views gardens, pools and hillsides. The mountain height difference is varied and the terrain is complex, creating a different scenery.

The basic principle at the beginning of design is to keep everything useful and clear everything unnecessary. As a result, the stark and purely geometric shape of the building is preserved, and the wild edges of the house are also preserved. The middle zone at these poles serves as an important transitional space, and the designers link modern comfort and unknown nature with an ecologically soft step.

Among the plants fully integrated into the background are the addition of olive, oak, California sycamore, and redbud trees, and thousands of (mostly) native grasses, sage, lilacs, and other mixed plants as understory vegetation. This arrangement of plants, full of Southern California characteristics, is the key to the impressive garden.

The garden was under construction for nearly a year, during which the designers worked with arboricists to transform the existing twisted and rough oak trees into sculptures of the site, which together with the boulders placed under the trees constitute a peaceful spiritual place. A cliffside platform and boardwalk give the pool a new look, while a grey brick walkway that is neither modern nor classic presents a warm blend of granite and cobblestone, which together set the garden’s light tone.

05
惠特利高地
WHITLEY HEIGHTS

TERREMOTO

The illusory haze of vintage Hollywood expressed itself in a wild appropriation of Mediterranean and Mission style architectural forms: Italian, Morrocan, Mexican and Californian. Horticulture followed suit, mixing and mingling into a seductive Shangri-La: an origin that was somehow already everywhere: the scattering and the source of all botanical provenances. Back then, the smoke and mirrors of the cinema permeated the very groundwater, only to manifest anew in a local landscape of lurid and erotic surreality.

Reveries like these come to us as we contemplate our commission for a garden in Whitley Heights, an historic hillside village in the Hollywood Hills. We arrive at the site winking at its stately sense of its own borrowed past. We inhale the ether of this ersatz Pangaea—the fantasy of global flora reunified in the singular estate. The ether fills our lungs. We look out again, our studious gazes destabilized by sips of an absinthe of botanical delusions. We lean back in leather chairs and we sleep.

Intoxicated, we dream of a storied and aged Old Hollywood cast of character actors, flooding past us like taxonomic credits: Hedera helix, Cupressus sempervirens, Agave attenuata, Alsophila australis, Philodendron selloum. Or, like partygoers, other plants approach us: we gossip with Ficus pumila, Bougainvillea, and Cedrus deodara.

The credits roll quickly, and the party talk is typically vapid. Our minds wander, our slumber turns morose and we hallucinate an avant-garde intervention, a new faux reality superimposed on the old lie: the dream piled over the dream, in the usual rhythm of this city’s industry.

So we make rash and wild invitations to the party. We send for Achillea millefolium, Cercis canadensis, Cupressus cashmeriana and Brahea armata. We dance crazily with Furcraea macdougallii, Centranthus ruber, and Kalanchoe beharensis. The sun rises behind the hills. The party comes to an end. We stand on the rooftop, smoking cigarettes, looking back over the city in the glow of the dawn. This is the New Old Hollywood. We exhale the botanical illusions of our own making. We dream again of the garden: the dream is a garden; the garden is a dream.