Outpost

A 1927 Colonial Spanish Revival above Hollywood, where the garden was never meant to be looked at, it was meant to be lived in.

The house sets the vocabulary: arched doors, hand-troweled plaster, clay tile, wrought iron. We carried those curves outward. The pool is board-form concrete with a raised coping, its edges drawn as a soft radius so the water reads as another arch in the plan, the archways of the house echoed underfoot.

From there the garden unfolds in rooms. A gravel courtyard with a stone basin and a pair of iron benches. A plaster-and-brick fireplace with woven chairs pulled close. A corten-edged bed of herbs and citrus behind a wrought-iron gate. Terracotta pots, olive and kumquat, aloes and palms, ferns climbing a creeping-fig wall in the shade.

Everything is durable, unfussy, and slightly imperfect, patinated pots, weathered wood, gravel that moves under your feet. It is a garden built for long dinners, cold mornings by the fire, and afternoons that end in the pool.