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LANDSCAPING IN SANTA ROSA VALLEY

This landscaping project all started with one small item and one unique city as the inspiration. The item was a brass bell that the client had picked up somewhere years before. The idea here was to build everything around the bell. The city was Santa Barbara, California. The client couldn’t live in Santa Barbara, a coastal city about an hour’s drive north, and still have an easy 15 minute commute to work, but we would try to bring Santa Barbara to him. The city is famous for several things, among them the Spanish mission theme taken from the original mission church grounds there (as well as restaurants out on the pier, an art show on the beach every weekend and lots of expensive property).

Anyway, the conversation about this project started out with a trip into the back shelves of the garage to look over this brass bell. It needed to be shined a little, having sat there for some time, but it hadn’t lost its purpose. It might have begun its life on a small ship somewhere but it really didn’t matter. What it represented to this client was the only salient point. The client’s property was in Santa Rosa Valley, California. The houses there sit on fairly large lots, usually at least an acre. Some of the neighbors had horses and others had big gardens. This one had a lot of hillside and the only flat area was in the front yard. To give you some idea, the door which led out of the back of the house was on the second story. Since the house sat back from the street several hundred feet, being on a flag lot, this opened the door to seriously considering a large front yard patio. At the time the front yard consisted of an old Doughboy swimming pool left over from the previous owner partially filled with several inches of very healthy algae, an impressive field of three foot high weeds and whatever surprises might await an unwary person brave enough to venture into their midst.

The view of the back yard was nothing to get exited about either, being the apparent storage lot for the no-longer-needed odds and ends, wood for the fireplace and other items that weren’t really part of an ideal patio setting. This immediately called for a wall. The idea of creating a mission style gate (complete with its bell) made the wall feel less like a barrier and more like an historic entryway into some setting that could be imagined to be anything a guest might want to imagine. A lock on the gate helped to keep the imagination alive. The old used brick, taken from an old building somewhere that had succumbed to an earthquake, no doubt, added to the feeling that this had been built by missionaries centuries ago. A little artistic license was taken in the brick protruding from the stucco wall – the real old mission walls were actually made from brick and the brick became visible when the stucco fell off. This building procedure doesn’t fit with the modern building codes (then again, the wall probably won’t fall down in the next earthquake). Other things that the old mission in Santa Barbara doesn’t have that this modern replica needed was an electronic irrigation controller to run the sprinklers, a low voltage lighting system with brass fixtures to light it up at night and instead of having hard-packed earth for a floor (not too practical for high heeled shoes the day following a rain storm) we used texture stamped concrete with multiple earth-tone colors that looks like stone. Fortunately, these things are all subtle and don’t distract from the overall effect.

Santa Rosa Valley is a very nice area with generally large homes, many of which have a view of the low mountains on either side of the valley. Some of the homes, further up into the hills, have a stunning view of the distant ocean on a clear day. This property had both, but the view of the ocean was only visible from the top of the back yard, quite a ways from the house. This was taken advantage of by building a gazebo at the top of the property and constructing a winding staircase that made this possible to get to from the house. You might not want to eat breakfast there every day, but an occasional picnic basket and a bottle of wine is well worth the hike. As is common in areas with larger properties, the whole area is on septic tank systems. This is partly because many of the homes have been there for a long time and partly because there are not as many homes per square mile as in more congested areas so the cost of running in a new sewer system for the whole area is divided up amongst fewer homeowners making it an unusually expensive proposition.

Consequently, part way through the project, it was determined that the old septic system should probably be replaced before the new patio was put down and the trucks had to drive across it. We finished up the first half of the project, got out of the way while the trucks with the big digging auger and the gravel came in and drilled a hole 50 feet deep and filled it up with rock (by the way, 50 feet is an impressive hole in the ground).

The concrete was then poured, the plants and trees were put in the ground, lights and sprinklers were hooked up and the new front yard patio was ready for the first bottle of wine (it was a Chardonnay if I remember).

All in all it was a successful project and the brass bell finally got its proper home.
Bruce Larsen