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Urban Renewal

From clay slick to party scene, a city lot comes alive

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Barry Wong Hostas, heucheras and vines are typical of the textural foliage plantings emphasized by landscape architect Tim Moshier. Here they fluff out the pre-fab shed in the back garden, further gussied up with framed paintings. Barry Wong Ralph Satterlee, left, and Dan Petesch relax in the front courtyard on Adirondack chairs painted apricot and sky blue. Barry Wong Cracks in the stone paving allow for layered, bubbling fountains to rise among the ferns in the front garden. Their water music distracts from traffic noise and adds to the intimate feel of the courtyard. Barry Wong While most of the garden is planted with year-round shades of green, seasonal masses of bedding plants like these lavender impatiens enliven the scheme. Barry Wong What used to be a narrow chute is now a gracious walkway lined with hydrangea, hosta and Japanese forest grass. The lush plantings add an air of mystery to the progression from front to back garden. Barry Wong Every piece of antiqued bluestone was hand cut and laid to create a random pattern that suits the casual, Craftsman-style cottage. The front courtyard serves as a second living room, especially on warm days when the west-facing deck is too hot for habitation.

"IT WAS THE worst yard ever, nothing more than a clay slick, and we mowed down the weeds," Ralph Satterlee says of the dead space around the cottage he bought in 1992 in the Mount Baker/Leschi Ridge neighborhood. Before tackling the disaster of a garden, Satterlee and his partner, Dan Petesch, worked with architect Michael Heffron to take the old house down to the studs in a major remodel. They pushed walls into the back yard and added dormers, gaining 1,000 square feet of new living space. Now a deck overlooks the back garden, affording a distant view of the city with sunset backdrop.

After the light-filled, colorful cottage was completed, the guys turned their project-management talents to the standard 50-by-100-foot city lot. The front garden lies slightly below the grade of a street without sidewalks; the back garden falls away steeply. Neither man was a gardener, but they started out with some amelioration money from nearby Interstate 90 tunnel damage and were lucky to have landscape architect Tim Moshier of Cambium Inc. as a neighbor.

I heard about the garden from a landscape-architect friend who had been to a magical evening party there. Perhaps it was with just such a party in mind that Moshier designed the makeover. "It called out for different spaces," he says of the distinct garden rooms that now add many square feet of livable space to the little house. Moshier worked with the sloping property to create intimate spaces that work as well for entertaining as for private dining or relaxing. Repetition of stone, plus copper in fence and fountains, link the garden rooms and create a feeling of logical, elegant progression through the spaces.

Making a small garden live large

Tim Moshier of Cambium Inc. shared design tricks to make the most of limited garden space:

• There's not a blade of grass in the garden. Every inch is planted for privacy, texture and color. Open space is created with paved areas that double as outdoor living and dining rooms.

• The outdoor rooms flow naturally into each other, but remain distinct in function and feel. "It's possible to create lots of change and sequence in a small area," says Moshier "Transitions are key." For example, when creating a transition from the street to the house, Moshier used natural granite blocks near the street, then paved the patio with antiqued bluestone to tie in with the porch's cut bluestone tiles.• The narrow side yard is not just a passage from front to back, but its own atmospheric garden space, thick with colorful plantings in blues and yellows.

Now you step out the front door into a courtyard paved in antiqued bluestone. Artificially aged by tumbling, the stone has softly rounded edges that work well with the casual Craftsman style of the home. Intimacy is created by subtle night lighting, planted pots and two little bubbly fountains that effectively drown out noise from I-90.

Next came structural plantings such as a hedge of enkianthus and a green wall of leylandii cypress. The following year, the back garden was recaptured from the weeds, its slope retained and shaped by stone. Moshier chose mostly textural plants so the garden would look good whether or not it was in bloom. Large hostas and more finely textured sedges and grasses clothe the garden year 'round; in season, they're joined by masses of a single kind of showy flower, such as iris in spring. The shady side garden is lined in hydrangeas, blue-toned hostas and puddles of golden Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra 'Aureola').

The new spaces have turned Satterlee and Petesch into garden enthusiasts who not only entertain outside but de-stress by caring for the plants.

In the far, back corner of the garden is a destination worth the descent. Here a stone patio and slab bench capture the warmth of the sun. Lush with plantings and tiny in scale, the private patio feels like an old-fashioned parlor. The adjacent pre-fab shed is painted midnight blue, laced with vines and garnished with elaborately framed paintings of buxom, round-faced women. Satterlee brought the paintings back from Mexico. "Those are the girls," he explains. "They sit out there, smoke and drink, and inhabit the garden."

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.