A New Entry
Lynn Perry and Rol Hesselbart, my neighbors in Heath, are a thoughtful couple. For ten years they have been thinking and thinking about adding a garage with storage space to their little house, halfway down a hillside. More than a year ago, they got serious about putting some of those thoughts into action.
After living with their site for so they knew they needed to figure out a way to manage the many changes in grade on the hill and all the water that flows down the hill. These were not problems they could solve themselves. First they hired a surveyor to make them a good topographical map of the area showing the grade changes.
The survey made it easier for the architect to site the garage.
Then they hired Bob Leete, a civil engineer, to design drainage systems that would handle not only the water that flows down the hill after rains and during the spring thaw, but the water that would come off the roofs of the new garage, the ‘bridge’ connecting the garage to the house, and the house itself, which would all come sheeting down into a small area.
Construction began in August 2006. Soil from the excavation for the garage was used to level and manage grade changes aided by stone walls built by Hesselbart and a Tibetan stone mason.
Adding the garage gave Perry an opportunity to create a real entryway to the house. She spent the winter reading The Welcoming Garden by Gordon Hayward, trying to come up with a plan. By spring the garage was finished, but a large area was just a construction site with bare earth and piles of soil.
“We’d given it so much thought,” Perry said, “but it looked like a wasteland and we were stuck. That’s when we called Walter Cudnohufsky, the landscape designer, for a consultation.”
In response to Cudnohufsky’s questions about what they wanted, about their own thoughts, and the difficulties they faced, Hesselbart and Perry talked about visitors parking in the driveway and still walking all the way around the house to the old entry door. The new entry was not visible, much less welcoming, and then there were still problems with water.
Perry said that Cudnohufsky was a great listener. “He’d be pacing around, measuring things and if there was a lull, he shout out, ‘Keep talking. Keep talking. Give me more.’”
Over the course of just under two hours Cudnohufsky began with some general ideas. He thought the drive area was too big and straight. It needed to be given a gentle curve, made smaller and brought down to human scale. The walkway needed to be brought out into the drive right in front of the garage providing a ‘landing’ and to make it clear that this was the way to walk. Planting beds needed to be put in on either side of the walkway, to further define the space and create the desired welcome.
The drainage problem off the roofs could be managed by terracing and incrementally changing the grade.
Those were the big ideas that have been put into place, along with three groups of clump birches, two to one side of the garage, one in the space between the house and the garage.
Some of his suggestions were about more specific principles. He suggested a stone pillar in the planting bed next to the garage that would be two thirds as high as the stone wall on the other side. Hesselbart used a stone from their land, not a pillar, but he kept the suggested proportion.
He suggested that the planting bed around the end of the stone wall, wrap around the wall.
Because Hesselbart and Perry had a construction drawing, Cudnohufsky was able to place drawing tissue over the plan and sketch in changes and suggestions as they came near the end of his visit. For the most part he did not suggest specific plants and they have been able to work with what they had, hollies that needed to be moved, and ferns that they transplanted from their woods.
Most of Cudnohufsky’s suggestions have been implemented. Perry and Hesselbart and happy with the process. Perry said, “He kept saying ‘I can see . . . ‘ He could see things beyond the construction mess.” And they are happy with the way they have been able to follow through.
I spoke with Cudnohufsky about when and how consultations can be useful. He said they can be helpful when a full design plan or installation is not needed or desired. A full design takes lots of talk and considerable time he said, “But it does not take a great deal of time to create conceptual alternatives and even find an enticing one. What does take time is the hard work of perfecting the organizing idea to make it ‘fit’ perfectly, work well and look great! “
The homeowner should prepare for a consultation by having specific questions about a specific area as Perry and Hesselbart did, needing help with an entryway.
“To use the full skills of a designer, not only as a technical problem solver, or as a person with plant knowledge, homeowners should have questions. The more questions the better. And preferably hard questions, not yes or no questions,” Cudnofuksky said.
In turn the homeowner “should expect the designer to be perceptive, bring surprising, possibly new information to the discussion about your already well known site. You should expect the designer to have good questions of his own, to be an attentive listener, to have multiple ideas, and to articulate the problems and needs as part of or before offering alternatives,” Cudnohufsky said.
Planting continues, and there is talk about the additional stone wall Cudnohufsky recommended, but the desire has been achieved. The driveway moves gracefully to a clear entry to the house that embodies the warm welcome and hospitality that lies within.
October 2007