Author, editor, and Pulitzer Prize–nominated architecture critic Beth Dunlop admits she’s written less about landscape architecture than anything else. But her new book for Rizzoli, Gardens for Modern Houses: Design Inspiration for Home Landscapes ($55), featuring the leafy surrounds of thirty-five mid-century and newer modern homes, changes all that, and has changed Dunlop’s own outlook as well. “I have great admiration for ways in which landscape architecture can lend understanding of a historic house,” Dunlop tells ANTIQUES. “And,” she says, “given the climate crisis, it’s the profession of the future.” When World War II ended a new, ebullient attitude swept the country. The economy was humming, the middle class was growing, and development drew citizens into suburbia, where spacious plats afforded homeowners the opportunity to extend their recreational lifestyles inside the house to the outside.
“Terraces, pools, patios, barbeques, and tetherball poles were all a part of a new urban/suburban way of living. In many places the garden became integral to the house,” Dunlop explains. “The projects shown take it a step further. They integrated new horticultural knowledge and thinking in landscape architecture.” In-depth plant information in Gardens for Modern Houses gives readers and garden enthusiasts the tools to re-create planting schemes if they are so inclined, a detail that supports the book’s mission, which—aside from demonstrating how thoughtful setting enhances architecture—is to show how modern landscapes connect us to nature, an environment we are ultimately designed to exist within.
Dunlop scouted the country in search of residential modern gardens bearing a desired blend of characteristics. “What I sought were landscapes that worked within the framework of modernism; of our time and the house’s time,” she says. “It was a lot of looking. I bought old anthologies of House Beautiful, Sunset, and Homes and Gardens,” she continues, describing only one facet of years of research. “There were leads and there were leads to dead ends.” The gardens she settled on are by contemporary leaders in the field—Reed Hilderbrand, Mia Lehrer, Terremoto, Wagner Hodgson, Marmal Radziner, Judy Kameon/Elysian Landscapes, Raymond Jungles—and were designed for new modern houses, or to refresh the look of classics. Actress/singer Mandy Moore’s picturesque Pasadena, California, home by mid-century architect Howard Zook, with its Terremoto “native-ish” garden of mingling bougainvillea, cactus, and opuntias, are in the book but were sadly destroyed during the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year. “The areas that burned in Los Angeles were some of the most lush in LA. Ironically, they were at their most beautiful,” Dunlop says. A portion of the book’s proceeds will be donated in support of rebuilding parts of Los Angeles devastated by fire.
“One realization I’ve had is that we’ve turned, as a society living in a place like Miami Shores [as the author does], inward with our houses,” Dunlop says. But “our connection to nature is so important. So much time is spent looking at screens that we forget that the three-dimensional view is the one that soothes and calms us, and connects us to the past and present,” she muses, gazing into her backyard, where a neighborhood squirrel is pillaging her bird feeder. “I’m on the phone talking to you, looking at a two-hundred-year-old oak tree, and thinking about how the oak trees were here first.”
Across more than three hundred pages of historical, architectural, horticultural, and sociological content, Gardens for Modern Houses offers readers bountiful information on a design philosophy and lifestyle that continue to bear new blossoms, and inspiration for how to preserve the beauty and bounty nature lends freely.
Perhaps most importantly, it shows that adding modern design value at home can be yours for the price of dirty hands and elbow grease.
