Living

Wednesday, Jun. 17, 2009

Los Osos home is dream setting for a seaside wedding

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Although they lived in the San Francisco Bay area, Robert and Marilyn Wills had always enjoyed the Central Coast. They had friends there and fond memories of overnights in Pismo Beach on family trips.

In 1998, they bought a house in Los Osos with a view of Morro Rock and a colorful garden designed by Lance Cornwall. A vacant lot next door gave them privacy and an unimpeded view of the sunrise; they bought it a year later, leaving it undeveloped.

Then, in 2007, their son announced he was planning to remarry and wanted a garden wedding. They agreed to host the wedding, aware it would require a larger deck and a patio. They contracted Casey Johnston to build the deck, and landscape architect Jeffrey Gordon Smith to extend their garden into the empty lot. Sage Ecological Landscapes did the garden installation.

A glass wall shelters a spa on the windward side of the ipe wood deck. Johnston built-in a barbeque and service counter, and designed the steel and cable backrests for the concrete wall-benches. The benches, with two integrated fire pits, were fabricated by concrete contractor Roy Burch. Burch also made the unique fire trough table and an oval garden bench, both with blue glass encased in smooth concrete.

Smith is renowned for designing gardens that relate to their natural environment. In this garden, the line between nature and the domesticated landscape was blurred by planting grasses and reeds that resemble the native juncus reeds along the Morro Bay estuary shoreline.

Oklahoma flagstone pavers echo the color of sand dunes, while the black Mexican pebbles between pavers evoke the waterways that trickle into the estuary. Groups of matching pavers set into the mulched pathways further away from the house unite the more distant parts of the garden with the area near the house.

In addition to the deck’s fire pits, there are two more in the garden. A large one in the patio can accommodate a group on its semi-circular

stacked-stone wall bench. Some of the wedding guests lingered there past midnight. A smaller pit with seating for two was shaped to match a sinuous driftwood log.

The Wills found unusual garden accents at Art City, a stone sculptors’ co-op in Ventura. “Silent water” flows gently down a basalt column fountain in the meditation garden. The “Whale” fountain periodically spurts water that falls into a shallow bird bath carved into its back. A fossil-filled Baja

The ipe wood deck, with its corner fire bowl, overlooks the large fire pit and Morro Bay.

Gold boulder is tentatively called “Geologica.”

The Wills still marvel at the cooperative spirit of everyone involved, saying, “The individual craftsmen contributed their ideas, and then they figured out how to make it work. Any differences were readily resolved because nobody tried to dominate.”

This garden received one of five Dream Garden Awards featured in Sunset magazine’s April issue.