We fell for our house the moment we saw it. We knew that with love and
labor we could turn it into our very own little manor house in the city.
The backyard, however, was unprepossessing. A key selling point of many
houses in Los Angeles is a city view; we didn't have one. On the
contrary, our yard was completely boxed in. We had sky, but no
skyscrapers. To a lot of potential buyers, that would have been a
dealbreaker. (In fact, it had been on the market for a while with no
takers.) The lack of a vista didn't bother me, however; the ever-present
sight of a rumbling, grumbling city from my windows has always set me
slightly on edge. I thrill to its charms from the rim of a champagne
flute at the
Tower Bar, but at home I'm much happier pretending that I live in the middle of the countryside.
So, faced with an exceptional house and completely ordinary back garden,
what were we to do? The Divine Italian was temporarily stumped. So I
did what I always do in uncertain times: I turned to Diana Vreeland.
(Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd).
She's one of the mentors I carry around
with me in my head. (Some of the others -- Cecil Beaton, Vita
Sackville-West, Beverley Nichols, Vanessa Bell -- you're familiar with
if you read this blog.) Well, I started thinking about the fact that
this incredible fashion superstar was born with a profile slightly
reminiscent of an Easter Island statue, but instead of trying to work
around it, she owned it. She wore minimal makeup, a severe hair style and a commanding gaze. Everything was designed to draw the eye to the face, not away from it. She celebrated her look to such an extent that she became an iconic example of elegance and style.
And presto, there was my epiphany.
What
we needed to do was transform our garden's weakest point into its
greatest strength. So what if we had no view? What we needed to do was really
have no view. We needed to completely erase the outside world from our
entire backyard and turn it into our very own secret refuge.
It would need to be a mini-garden of
enchantment, surrounded by huge hedges to guarantee absolute privacy,
filled with climbing vines, flowers, follies and more. It would need
to incorporate our "cocktail" pool (so-called because you're never more
than a stroke away from one), our future summer house, and have
enough green grass left over for games of badminton or croquet. It would
need to be part Frances Hodgson Burnett, part Sissinghurst and part
Lewis Carroll.
It would take time.
It would take money.
We would do it in phases.
The trees arrived yesterday.
