Celebrating the Landscape: Three Landscape Projects Honor Their Sites
BY NORA BURBA TRULSSON
Ventana Canyon Residence
Tucson, Arizona | John Stropko | New Desert Gallery, Inc. | Tucson, Arizona
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BARBARA STROPKO
 A house and its landscape near Ventana Canyon in Tucson were sited on a rock outcropping.
Landscape designer and contractor John Stropko loves a challenge when it comes to his projects. But a recent landscape in Tucson's Ventana Canyon area was beyond challenging. "One step over the edge, and you're dead," says Stropko flatly.
Luckily, Stropko and his crew who designed and built the one-acre contemporary garden lived to tell the tale.
The site, basically a rock outcropping with more vertical than horizontal surface, is located high in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains, near the Ventana Canyon landmark, some 40 feet above the subdivision's street level. But the owners, a couple with grown children, loved the 360-degree views of mountain above and city below, as well as its sense of tranquil isolation.
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Landscape designer and contractor John Stropko of New Desert Gallery created a patio, ponds, planting areas, a spa and barbecue for the home. |
The clients asked Tucson architectural designer Don Kornberg of Bauhaus Design Development, Inc. to create a contemporary house for the site. He responded with a multilevel design marked by a combination of barrel-vaulted and cantilevered rooflines. Stropko, principal of New Desert Gallery, was asked to design a patio space for the back of the house that would be large enough for entertaining and relaxing.
A driveway was cut into the rocky site, as was a building site. "We had to build part of the landscape before the house was built," recalls Stropko. "Once the house was positioned, there wouldn't have been a way for us to get around it."
The back patio site, approximately 800 square feet, was jackhammered out, leaving behind a perimeter of natural boulder outcroppings. Stropko cut lower than finished grade to accommodate utility lines below the patio's paving surface and to create pockets for planting. As access was dicey, the crew carried most materials and equipment up to the site by hand, pumped the concrete, and moved topsoil and boulders by crane.
 The spa is surrounded by a perennial-filled planter. A metal railing marks the edge of the cliff.
At the cliff's edge, Stropko anchored the patio with a circular, monolithic spa, partially encircled by a raised planter bed. A barbecue buffet is a visual counterpoint across the patio, with a curving countertop that seemingly floats above a boulder base. Subtle water elements were also part of the landscape plan. Two plant-filled koi ponds were positioned closer to the house, with the ponds' edges set back to give the illusion that the patio surface floats over the water. Stropko also created a "mini waterfall" with a one-foot drop into one of the ponds, and a series of seeps between the rocks. "We wanted it to look like the mountain after a rainfall," he explains.
Stropko used a palette of desert-adapted plant materials to soften the hardscape of integrally colored concrete, exposed pea gravel concrete and slate tile. Plants, including succulents, cactus, shrubs, bog plants and perennials, were tucked around boulders and into small beds and placed in the water features. "We tried to keep as much of the site's natural vegetation as possible," he says. "We even tried to get plantings going in the cracks of boulders." Stropko avoided using large trees or tall shrubs. "Anything big would have looked out of place there."
The patio area includes a cantilevered barbecue buffet, ponds and space for entertaining. |
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As finishing touches, Stropko installed subtle landscape lighting throughout the back patio area — even in the boulders — and ran a low-profile metal railing along the sides of the back patio with the steepest drop-offs.
The "extreme" project paid off. It won a Grand Award from the recent national Professional Landcare Network's Environmental Improvement Awards program.
Landscape design and contractor: New Desert Gallery, Inc., 4630 S. Country Club Road, Tucson, AZ 85714; (520) 741-8210 or www.newdesertgallery.com.
Architectural design: Bauhaus Design Development, Inc., Tucson, AZ; (520) 529-9528.
Concrete: Carson Concrete Specialists, Inc., 3475 N. Dodge Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85716; (520) 325-0557 or www.carsonconcrete.com.
Santa Catalina Foothills Residence
Tucson, Arizona | Faith Okuma, ASLA, AICP, LEED AP | Design Workshop | Santa Fe, New Mexico
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DALE A. HORCHNER
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A roomy "placita" and ramada are the main outdoor living spaces for the garden. |
Tucson's old barrio neighborhoods are visual treats, even for the casual visitor. Thick adobe walls, exuberant color, recycled metal gates, interior courtyards and heritage gardens dot the city's old neighborhoods, many of which date back to the 1800s.
These neighborhoods proved to be inspirational palettes for landscape architect Faith Okuma, along with Santa Fe architect Suby Bowden, when they teamed to create a residence in Tucson's Santa Catalina Foothills that emphasized outdoor living and garden spaces.
The clients, a couple with grown children, planned to split their time between a residence in Chicago and the Tucson home. And the husband, a native of Australia, was keenly sensitive about water conservation and using native plant materials.
 A mural by Sam Leyba embellishes a wall behind the pool.
"The idea was to create a little Mexican-style village with a paved 'street' that links everything together," explains Okuma, whose landscape career has taken her from Phoenix to Santa Fe and, most recently, to Hawaii, where she has since become general manager of a development company. As the program called for some 10,000 square feet of house, the village approach broke up the building into three wings — a central living area with a master suite to one side and guest quarters on the other — interspersed with patios and plants.
The site plan not only reduced the mass of the house, it was also physically necessary because of the hilly nature of the three-acre site. "The site was three vacant lots in an old residential development, surrounded by open desert," says Okuma, whose Design Workshop team included Claudia Horn, Joseph Charles and Bruce Trujillo. "The neighborhood has strict ordinances to protect the desert. Our chosen building site was a rather narrow hilltop with sharp drop-offs." The home and its gardens were, in essence, "draped" onto the site, with the main living wing sitting some 12 feet higher than the master suite and guest quarters.
The pool area is sited below the main ramada. |
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Before the building began, Okuma studied the site's wind patterns and potential microclimates that would be created by the house itself. More lush and fragile plantings would be placed closer to the house, while the outlying desert would be preserved and even boosted with the addition of a little irrigation during the construction phase.
Playing off the home's contemporary Mexican architecture, including rammed earth and brightly colored stucco walls, Okuma created a clean, neutral hardscape. A sloping drive paved in aggregate leads from the street to an auto court. A small trickle and pond greet visitors at the front entry, a reference to seasonal seeps that occur in nearby Sabino Canyon. At the back of the house, a large "placita," paved in porphyry stone cobbles, is the site of outdoor living, particularly under its generously sized ramada, illuminated with a constellation of star lanterns from Mexico.
An angled natural stone wall separates the upper plaza from the lower pool terrace. The long, rectangular pool, deep enough for diving, includes a spa at one end and is placed against a wall embellished with a tile mural by Santa Fe artist Sam Leyba.
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Landscape architect Faith Okuma was inspired by a traditional Mexican landscape
technique when she placed agaves and hesperaloe in the top of a garden wall. |
Okuma chose plantings carefully for various areas of the landscape, consulting with Phoenix garden designer and plant expert Carrie Nimmer. Away from the house, Okuma used only local Sonoran Desert natives, including palo verde trees, brittlebush and creosote. To screen the outer flanks of the guest and master suite wings, she used ocotillo, blue agave and acacia trees. Ironwoods provide shade for the main placita, but Okuma chose heritage oaks for shade near the guest parking area, through the entry courtyard and down the front of the guest wing. "We used the heritage oak instead of a native oak because their growth pattern works in those narrow areas," Okuma explains.
Okuma also borrowed a typical Mexican planting technique by placing cactus, hesperaloe and agave into narrow beds atop the garden walls. The plantings help screen views and act as deterrents to anyone wanting to scale the walls. She also included a climbing rose in the plant list, a nod to a traditional barrio garden.
Flagstone stepping stones lead to a lower-level garden area, planted
with yellow-blooming palo verdes. |
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As a conservation strategy, the plantings were grouped according to their water needs. Additionally, the landscape makes use of a relatively new state gray-water ordinance, which allows reuse of non-septic water.
The landscape — and the home — have served the clients well, Okuma reports. "They really do spend a lot of time outdoors when they're in Tucson."
Landscape architecture: Design Workshop, Inc., 506 Agua Fria St., Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 982-8399 or www.designworkshop.com.
Architecture: Suby Bowden + Associates, 333 Montezuma Ave., Suite 200, Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 983-3755 or www.sobadesign.net.
Builder: Jeff Willmeng Homes, 3567 E. Sunrise Drive, Suite 219, Tucson, AZ 85718; (520) 529-2988 or www.jeffwillmenghomes.com.
Exempla Good Samaritan Medical Center
Lafayette, Colorado | Lynn Moore, FASLA | Davis Partnership Architects | Denver, Colorado
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ED LACASSE
 Seating areas and planter beds follow the curve of the hospital building. Planting materials were chosen for their drought tolerance.
Farming is part of Lafayette, Colorado's past. The city's official history refers to tidy farms, dating to the late 1800s, that produced crops of oats, corn and wheat, along with plentiful orchards and garden patches bursting with strawberries, raspberries and gooseberries.
When Davis Partnership Architects was asked to masterplan and design a landscape for the new 75-acre Exempla Good Samaritan Medical Center, anchored by a hospital and a Kaiser Permanente medical office facility, the firm went back to Lafayette's agrarian roots for inspiration.
"The overriding idea was that the outdoors should be a rich and healing experience for staff, patients and their families," explains landscape architect Lynn Moore, the principal in charge of the landscape project. Davis Partnership also designed the medical center's buildings. "We went back to the idea of farm and home. We didn't want people to just pull up to a parking spot and walk into the building."
Playing off the hospital and medical facility's curving form, Moore and her Davis Partnership team used the themes of homesteads, crop circles, irrigation ditches, crop rows and rolling hills to create a landscape plan for the entire site, including the perimeter and areas to be constructed in future phases.
At the "heart" of the landscape, the entry sequence to the hospital itself, Moore suggested a water feature that starts as a spring, or well, by the entrance, then moves in a concrete channel away from the building, giving way to a cobbled channel and then a pond beyond the parking area. Plantings were done in circular forms, interspersed with row plantings.
Berms separate the parking area from the hospital entrance. "You walk through a threshold of rounded land forms," explains Moore, "and you not only get a visual separation from your car, you get a psychological separation, too. The berms also absorb the sound of cars."
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A water feature starts as a symbolic well near the hospital entrance (top), then moves through a concrete channel (above) before making its way through a cobbled channel (left) into a pond beyond the
parking area. |
At the hospital's entry, paved patio areas with tables, chairs and benches provide places to gather, eat lunch or sip coffee. Moore notes that the outdoor furniture is metal and more contemporary closer to the building, while benches farther away are wooden for a more pastoral look.
While the campus is being built in phases, unbuilt tracts of land were also treated as landscape opportunities. "We graded the undeveloped areas into rolling hills and ripples of land, planted with native grasses," says Moore. The cost-effective approach gives the facility a finished look. The perimeter was also purposefully planted, giving the entry drive and the side of the campus facing a highway a woodsy appeal.
According to Moore, plants were selected for drought tolerance, as well as year-round appeal. "We zoned the plants so that those with the greater water needs were placed closer to the building — a 'more people, more green' theory — while the most drought-tolerant plants were placed at the lesser-used sites. We also wanted something to enjoy in all four seasons."
For spring and summer color and fragrance, lilacs, spireas and roses greet those who pass through the entry area. From late summer into early fall, native wildflowers take over. In the fall, bands of red maples provide a rhythm of color near the highway. In the winter, even under a light dusting of snow, rock mulch and planting patterns create a decorative geometry.
With the first phase completed, plans are underway for future construction. The landscape plan provides both flexibility and a permanent sense of comfort. "In the past, medical facilities had an institutional feeling," says Moore. "We tried to make this a place for people; from the moment you turn off the highway to the sight of blooming flowers near the entrance, we wanted this to be a place of caring."
Landscape architecture, planning and architecture: Davis Partnership Architects, 2301 Blake St., Suite 100, Denver, CO 80205; (303) 861-8555 or www.davispartner.com.
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