personal paradise

Take advantage of tucked-away garden spaces, and you'll gain an inviting retreat for beginning and ending each day.

This delightful backyard brims with beautiful features, including a pool, an arbor, a fountain, a gate, nd a garage. Owners Alec Michaelides and Ken Lemm redesigned the entire area while remodeling their 1940s home in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood. With lush plantings, classic building details, and carefully crafted stonework, Alec and Ken (who are both landscape architects) took away the contemporary edge created by a previous owner's construction projects. Alec says, "We thought that the overall bones of the house suggested more of a shingle-and-stone cottage style." See how the miraculous makeover took place.

Perfecting the Pool

The original pool became a dark and dramatic mirror in the landscape. "We basically gutted the entire backyard, but we left the general shape of the pool," Alec says. To give it more ' of a pond look, they selected a black pebble finish for the interior surface and replaced the original concrete decking with Tennessee crab orchard stone.

To create an evergreen background for the pool area, the homeowners planted a row of tall hemlocks near the rear property line. Alec says, "We limbed them up so that they wouldn't take up as much space and we could landscape underneath." Though the lower 5 or 6 feet of each trunk is bare, the wooden fence behind the trees gives privacy. The tall evergreens screen the rooftops of neighboring houses.

An Outstanding Arbor

Alec and Ken devised a raised stone planter in which columns support a wooden arbor. It fits into a shallow space under a row of windows on the back wall of the house. American boxwoods fill the planter, helping to conceal an unwanted expanse of painted brick, and wisteria trails across the arbor. This design solution added depth and dimension.

Graceful Garage

The old garage, basically a lean-to, was torn down, and the new one, complete with a second-floor guest suite, was constructed in its place. Alec notes, "The garage is so important because it is really the backdrop for the pool." Several features, such the window box, the dovecote, and the gabled roofline, were patterned after the architecture of the remodeled house. A picket fence bordering the parking area incorporates an arched gateway that frames the garden entry.

The owners used an olive jar as the base of a fountain between the garage and pool. Water trickles over the jar, through a bed of stone into a basin, and then it recirculates.

Advice From the Pros

In creating this getaway, these homeowners made the most of their garden's assets by solving its existing problems and enhancing its best features. "Instead of fighting the negatives that you have, try to turn them into positives," suggests Alec. "Would that have been the pool that I would have put in if designing this garden from scratch? Probably not. I worked with what I had, and it turned out pretty good."

* For More Info Stunning outdoor makeover and sources: southernliving.com/june2007

Copyright Southern Progress Corporation Jun 2007
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