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Northwest Living  |  By Valerie Easton

Making Relationships Work

In "Outside the Not So Big House," we see the beauty of integration

AUTHOR AND architect Sarah Susanka's "Not So Big" philosophy has sold more than a million books and catapulted her to national prominence as a cultural visionary. By declaring that comfort has nothing to do with size, and that we should build better not bigger, she's prodded architects, builders and homeowners into rethinking the scale of American houses. So you might expect her new book, "Outside the Not So Big House: Creating the Landscape of Home" (co-authored with Julie Moir Messervy, Taunton Press, $34.95) to be about small gardens. But you'd be wrong.

"The book shows how to integrate the garden with the house no matter what the size of the property," Susanka explained when she was in Seattle recently. "It's about the relationship of house and garden."

The book was a timely project, because Susanka and her husband began their first garden as she started work on the book. "We're new gardeners, and it's the love of our lives," says Susanka of the two-acre bramble patch they've transformed into a series of garden rooms around their Cape Cod-style home in Raleigh, N.C. She pulled out her laptop and scrolled through hundreds of garden photos to show me an Asian-style courtyard, stone pagodas, diagonal views and a "Tory" gateway, a symbol of the passage between the sacred and the everyday.

When Susanka and co-author Messervy, a landscape architect, looked over the submissions architects and landscape architects sent in for the book, they were amazed at how little regard each showed for the other's work. So she and Messervy set out to show how house and garden can better relate to each other. "At the transitional plane where house and garden meet, the boundaries aren't so rigid — you aren't sure if you're inside or out," says Susanka. She furthers this feeling with what she calls "eroded corners" created with wide eaves, indents and bays as well as corners of the house that are cut away but leave the shelter of roof overhead.

Susanka is impressed with Northwest landscapes, and two are included in the book. "You have a high-quality level of design here," she says, "and such great rain and lush environment." She points out that tall evergreens lend a built-in structure to our gardens that create a very different exterior canvas than in most of the country.

How do Susanka's architectural precepts apply to integrating our indoor and outdoor spaces? In the chapter "Three Cabins in a Forest," Susanka and Messervy examine a waterside estate near Port Townsend, offering insights into how, and why, it works.

In the first place, the authors say, the project by Seattle architect Jim Cutler and landscape architect Linda Attaway appeals to the longing many of us feel to live in a forest cabin, far away from the stresses of the everyday world.

On a cliff above the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Cutler and Attaway created "a self-contained village of three shingled huts set among towering Douglas fir and madrone trees. Although equal in size, each structure houses a different set of activities: One contains the living space, another accommodates a guesthouse and office, and the last structure holds an art studio over a garage. The first two sit at right angles to one another, enclosing a woodland garden, while the third angles outward to allow space for a lap pool and terrace."

Here, the enchantment of forest, high bluff and distant views merge, the authors say, and harmony is achieved.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.