21st Century Villa

There is nothing like a NEW Villa. Unlike its drafty European predecessors, it has all of the modern niceties. Heated toe vents under the sink! State of the art sound systems! Ceilings painted to look like the heavens! And a garden so dreamy I beam with pride every time I do a maintenance review visit (yes folks, a garden this grand requires professional gardeners and that is precisely what we offer). Cynthia’s first site visit found her Volvo clambering up the rocky yet-to-be paved drive with piles of blasted rock (big huge crane-sized rock) towering on either side. The clients interviewed Cynthia and she began getting that look. If you know Cynthia, you know the look. She can carry on a conversation but her gaze is darting everywhere, her design wheels are turning. Three months and several design meetings later, the first phase of the garden design began its construction. Earth was shaped and boulders unearthed from the property during construction were placed one by one by uber-crane operator Joe, to create a wall that would retain the front drive and give the property some added dimension. All the details of the placement of 550 yards of soil, driveway layout, pre-planning for irrigation, lighting power sources, and more were carefully hashed out. It was a grand scale orchestration of coordination between the clients, Cynthia, her sub-contractors, and the developer. P.S. this is what Cynthia thrives on. Specimen tree selection (assuring that the trees were large enough to meet the scale requirements of this large stone estate) took days of nursery treks. In the end the outcome was a fantastic one, complete with a European courtyard garden that is viewed from the kitchen sink and table (two of the key locations to think of in a garden design). A weeping mulberry tree will be specialty-pruned to serve as a playhouse. The long entry drive is graced with glorious gardens on either side filled with spring flowering bulbs and shrubs, summer and fall flowering perennial drifts, and ornamental grass collections that offer year-round color and interest.