This single family residential project is located in Menlo Park, in Northern California, known for its iconic Oak woodland landscapes and innovative Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. With a dream to build a new modern home that created an unified experience between the architecture and the natural world the client brought on our team, Studio Green, to help guide their design process.
The property is flat, with no pre-existing sub-surface drainage infrastructure. Located in the downtown area, it shares both the convenience of walking to schools and shops as well as the reality of cumbersome traffic noise and congestion. Essential to the project’s success was to disguise and mask the impacts from the adjacent busy street, minimize the need for new and expensive subsurface drainage infrastructure and create a welcome outdoor environment despite the client’s allergens to native pollens.
As a solution to these challenges, Studio Green worked closely with the architect and client to study the best building mass orientation and grading of the site. As a result, the home turns its back to the street, and wraps itself in a U-shape massing around the rear landscape. This thoughtful solution provided an inward facing framework for the home that honors the garden and its existing centenarian Valley Oaks, as the focus of the home.
The finished floor of the home was raised, and portions of the architectural circulation were ramped to accommodate a carefully graded site in respect to drainage. The central garden space acts as a retention basin during times of high precipitation, keeping all of the stormwater on the site.
The garden surrounds the home and can be experienced from every vantage point within the home. The home’s open and modern box form sets the stage for the garden and its distinguishing features. The garden’s geometries are playful, yet restrained as an attempt to provide relief from the bold architectural massing. These gestures are recognized in the custom stone and fencing patterning, deliberate boulder placement and graphic planting design.
To encapsulate a modern home aesthetic, stone paving gracefully meets and intertwines with a cadence of linier stone patterning – breaking one rhythmic motif and transitioning into another. This same sequence is expressed in the entry picket fencing. Other programmatic elements and site features requested by the client include a custom stone fire element, an irregular spa form set within the pool, a living wall skylighted in an exterior room and a series of juxtaposed natural and cut faced boulders scattered throughout the courtyard space.
Seasonal allergies are detrimental to the outdoor user experience for the client. The client requested a hypo-allergenic garden to help improve their ability to fully experience the garden. Our team gathered planting studies from horticulturist, Thomas Leo Ogren, who measured pollen metrics based on his defined Ogren plant allergy scale system (OPAL). Ogren’s rating system is used nationally to measure allergen factors in entire cities. The planting palette for this project was defined by planting with a low OPAL rating. These plantings were used to render a dynamic, colorful and textural garden for our client. For example, plantings such as Rhamnus californica, Arctostaphylus ‘Howard McMinn’, and Woodwardia fimbriata, were placed along the perimeter of the home to contextualize the space within its natural Oakwood landscape. The interior of the garden is patterned with drifts such as oranges from Abutilon ‘mock orange’ and Alstroemeria ‘orange’ , reds from Anigozanthos ‘red and Polygonum microcephalum ‘red dragon’ and purples from Agapanthus ‘Purple Cloud’ or Liriope gigantea.
The garden and the home harmoniously support each other in both form and function. This project is a testament to a rigorous and collaborative design process with the client and design team. A project that honors the garden as the heart of the project.
Architecture offices involved in the design: S^A | Schwartz And Architecture
Location: Menlo Park, CA
Design year: 2018-2021
Year Completed: 2021
