This house and garden were built a few years ago when the owner found this site just separated from an adjacent property. The owners chose to have the house architecture and the garden design develop together from the beginning so as to best achieve a good interrelationship between them.

Enter into the hidden ‘front’ garden: part orchard, part meadow and part perennial garden, all in a smallish space. From here, the stepped walkway to the front door is axial, simple and slightly formal.

The part of the garden that we next enter, through a small gateway from the front walkway, is ordinarily only seen and then entered into from the living room. It is a garden to be viewed rather than to be sat in or played in.

The rose garden is just above, and it in turn leads to a garden off the east side of the living room. This patio, with an espaliered sasanqua camellia-covered wall, conceals a view of the neighbor’s tennis court.

Then through a memory of an olive grove, through the lathed area, past potting benches and flower sinks, to a small lawn for play, surrounded by roses, a little hedging and an orderly vegetable patch with an old spreading coast live oak. Move through the breezeway into the courtyard. There is a simple raised pool at center, and clusters of pots that the owners plant with flowering perennials and annuals. Three citrus trees that used to fruit for the house next door, now thrive within the new courtyard planned about them. A California pepper tree was added for shade, balance and character. Bougainvillea vines garland the verandah roofs.

From the courtyard, move through the hedged auto court — and new jacaranda trees — down the side driveway whose paving and function are largely concealed from the house rooms’ views by both decorative and screening plantings.

Pass through a wooden gateway into the guest auto court, whose north wall conceals a small garden seen only from the dining room. The old California sycamore tree around which the driveway and auto court were planned, has been joined by additional sycamores, and by a team of yellow-flowering tabebuias flanking the driveway.