Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

Allan Broadbent, landscape architect and project manager for the LaurelRock Co. in Wilton, was honored with the 2014 International Landscape Design Award for a property in Darien.

The residential landscape design award, for the project "Balance Restored," was presented by the Association of Professional Landscape Designers.

The Gold Award was for his work directing a two-year landscape development project at the Darien residence. According to a news release from the LaurelRock Co., the 1932 brick residence on 1.8 acres was plagued by many landscape challenges, including flooding problems, poorly managed wetlands and tired foundation planting. In addition to overcoming those challenges, the program included the addition of a motor court, full-size pool environment and ornamental planting areas.

Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a graduate of Brigham Young University, Broadbent has been with the LaurelRock Co. for nearly a decade. He is a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-accredited professional.

The rest is here:
Darien property redesign garners national award

CARLO AND Lalie Scandiuzzi have renovated their garden and 1947 stucco home in Madison Park several times over the more than two decades theyve lived there. A 1995 kitchen addition wings out to create a sheltered courtyard that catches the morning sunshine. Fragrant Daphne odora Marginata makes sitting outside and sipping coffee on a warm spring morning pure heaven.

The couple hired landscape architect Keith Geller in 2000 to create more such sublime scenes and vignettes in their garden. He designed a major renovation, front and back, and has been tweaking the garden ever since. I pretty much did everything but the fig tree, says Keller of the big, old fig that overhangs the back patio to create a shady canopy for the outdoor dining table.

The hardscaping was mostly in place; Geller was tasked with designing the softscaping. Lalie and Carlo, who is executive director of ACT Theatre, use the garden for entertaining and to host events. Space for outdoor dining, pathways for strolling, and fragrant plants were high on the agenda.

The garden is part of the house; we live out here. We remodeled the house so we could best see and interact with the garden, says Lalie.

The property is a lot-and-a-half settled comfortably into a hillside. Keller gave the front garden a pastoral meadow feel with grasses and shrubs cascading down the slope. He softened the stair railing with a climbing hydrangea and added punctuation points of Italian cypress to reflect the style of the home.

Being an experienced gardener, Lalie asked not only for beauty but also for low maintenance. Keller obliged by planting evergreens such as boxwood and pittosporum. He chose mostly drought-tolerant plants, and massed them for effect and easier care. Lalie and Carlo both grew up in Geneva; Carlo is Italian, and the cypress are a nod to his ancestry. Lalie spent her youth in the country, and she loves how the informality of the front garden and the plants arranged like an Impressionist painting remind her of her childhood landscape.

Its not a Northwest garden, says Geller, who designed the plantings to go with the homes architecture. He plays around with rounded clumps and masses of rockroses and small evergreens for texture and flow through the gardens, and ornamental grasses for softness. Hes planted plenty of scented flowers, including lavender, daphnes and an oleander that has made it through the winters in its sheltered spot near the back deck. Geller also planted a lot of Lalies favorite chartreuse foliage, and blue, white and orange flowers, including crocosmia, iris, hellebores and agapanthus. Rhododendrons, boxwood and beautyberries lend structure and bloom through the seasons.

Masses of willowy white Japanese anemones light up the far reaches of the garden. When the couple and their guests sit outdoors around a fire late into the evening, the anemones glow in the reflection of the moon, and seem to dance along the back fence.

I love how Keith brings mystery and intrigue into the garden, says Lalie. Geller added boulders with curved paths around them and planted shrubs so you cant see the entire garden at once. Flowery vignettes draw guests along the pathways for a closer look.

The creative dialogue between Lalie and Geller has been going on for 14 years now. Heres how Lalie describes their creative collaboration: I have a vision. Keith and I discuss it, and Keith sees what I mean. With his mastery of plants and architecture, he makes it come alive. And then we play around with it.

See more here:
A European country garden on a Seattle city lot (and a half)

JEFFERSONVILLE

City Pride hosts landscape contest

City Pride, Jeffersonvilles Beautification Committee, is asking for nominations for its fourth annual home landscape contest.

Last years winners were Libby and Steve McCreight, who took top honors for their home in the Mellwood neighborhood.

It is very simple to enter this year. Call 812-989-0827 and leave the home address and the phone number of the nominated landscape and your name. Or you can email the information to Marilyn.Czape@twc.com.

There are a few rules:

It is required that you get the homeowners permission prior to submitting their landscape.

The home must be in the Jeffersonville city limits.

The landscape must be visible from the street (side or front yard). The contestants do not need to be home for the judging or otherwise do any additional work.

The winners receive two free tickets to the annual River Breeze Wine Tasting festivities held on the RiverStage Sept. 12, recognition at the event, a beautiful and unique yard sculpture and bragging rights for the year.

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BRIEFS: July 5-6, 2014

Why would anyone follow the advice of a landscape gardener whos been at it in Tucson for only five years?

Because, Bruce Hyland says, hes made a lot of mistakes in those five years. And he figures he could save a new gardener some time and heartache from those lessons he learned.

Hyland plans to give dozens of tips at his Tuesday talk, Down and Dirty Gardening. Its at the monthly meeting of The Gardeners of Tucson, of which he is a member.

The talk is aimed at new gardeners and those who think they have black thumbs.

I want to help people who have tried and it didnt work, says the retired business executive, consultant and professor, 62. Ive had so many failures, but I dont think its a bad thing.

Instead, Hyland has rediscovered the joy of gardening, something he avoided after leaving his tiny hometown of Haddam, Kansas.

As a teen and young adult, Hyland was known as the lawn mower king as he tended the gardens and lawns of all the old ladies in town.

The business paid his way to college. But once he started attending university, he was done with gardening. I swore I would never touch a plant as long as I lived, he says.

Thats not to say he didnt like gardens, but he had other people take care of his yards. That included while he lived eight years in Tucson in the 1980s as a manager and 22 years in San Francisco.

Fast forward to 2009, when Hyland was ready to retire. He decided to move back to Tucson. I always knew this was my spot on Earth, he says.

More:
Tucson garden thrives from years of heartache

Friday, July 4, 2014 | 6:00 a.m. CDT; updated 7:46 p.m. CDT, Friday, July 4, 2014

COLUMBIA In honor of the Fourth of July and backyard warriors everywhere, staff photographer Matt McCormack asked nine residents to show off how they use their outdoor space in the summertime. These are their stories and a glimpse of their greenery:

Luke and Barbara Buffaloe's backyard at 717 Hilltop Drive on June 29

The Buffaloes' backyard is a mix of trees, shrubs and wildlife. Luke and Barbara Buffaloe have found many ways to enjoy their yard, and their kids Ben, 2, and Eleanor, 3 1/2, have also found innovative ways to play in the landscape.

"We like to hike through the woods, and there's a pretty awesome swing hanging from a tree," Barbara said.

"In the last week we've seen raccoon, deer, owls, turkey, red tail hawk and a snapping turtle," Barbara said.

"There's a cylinder in the yard that used to be an old millstone. The kids use it as a rock box," she said.

"The historical society of Missouri said if we ever plan on getting rid of it that they wanted it," she said.

Marion and Alberta Dey's backyard at 4211 Rice Road on June 26

Read more here:
Landscaped escapes: Nine Columbia residents show off their lawns

Pari-mutuel betting means bigger pools for stability and confidence: Tabcorp chief operating officer for media and international product, Brendan Parnell. Photo: Louie Douvis

Punters are set to be able to bet into multimillion-dollar pools on Hong Kong racing when the first national tote pool comes into effect by the end of next year.

The powerful Hong Kong Jockey Club has set a goal to have one pari-mutuel pool on its meetings and will host Tabcorp and TattsBet punters' win, place, quinella, duet and trifecta bets from as early as September, subject to Australian Competition and Consumer Commissionapproval.

"We have the biggest pools in the world and we think we have the best racing," HKJC executive director of racing Bill Nader said. "We see have a benefit to have all international operators betting into our pools because of their size. The technology is available to do it, so want to do it now.

"It doesn't make sense to have a number of little pools around the world, which don't give punters the confidence to bet.This is the way of the future."

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Any bet placed on Hong Kong racing by a tote in Australia would be taxed only at home; a tax waiver will be in place for international bets in Hong Kong. The benefit of more turnover would therefore be returned to the Australian racing industry.

Australian pari-mutuel betting has levelled out in the past decade, whereas in Hong Kong betting has grown from $HK60 billion ($8.26 billion) in 2006 to $HK102 billion this year. The final race of the Hong Kong season on Sunday was expected to hold more than $HK50 million in the racing mecca.

The move would be a huge boost for tote pools in Australia, which turn over more than $100 million on racing in Hong Kong. It could also be the forerunner to a national tote being put in place for Australian racing. However, insiders say that would be not happen for at least five years, given it would require agreement between all states and territories.

Tabcorp has worked to be at the forefront of international wagering for the past decade and is taking every precaution to make sure it happens. It has the technology in place to co-mingle with any country and submitted an application in May to the ACCC to gain approval for the next seven years to bet and receive bets from overseas.

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Punters set to get access to huge Hong Kong betting pools in new deal

In 1600, what was to become Connecticut was essentially nothing but trees.

"If it isn't a rock outcrop, and it isn't a wetland or water body, and it isn't a bald patch on a coastal dune, it is all forest," said Robert M. Thorson, a University of Connecticut professor of geology who has researched changes in landscapes extensively.

Not only was the landscape dominated by trees, they were big, mostly mature trees, said David R. Foster, director of Harvard University's Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass., and an authority on New England forest history.

The Connecticut forest 400 years ago was a rich mix of species, often park-like, without much brush in the understory. In places, native Americans burned patches of forest to keep them open, but much of the state was simply mature, pristine forest.

Native Americans grew crops, but their numbers were comparatively small and their impact on the woodlands was thought to be slight, though there are differences of opinion today among researchers on how just how much the Indians altered the landscape.

Once European settlers arrived, in the first decades of the 17th century, landscape changes became far more dramatic, as early settlers cleared land for their farms. Still, at first, that clearing was largely confined to parts of the Connecticut River valley and the coast, old towns like Windsor, Hartford, Wethersfield, Old Saybrook and Guilford. The rest of the state was woods.

For example, as late as 1700 the hilly countryside that would become New Hartford was forest, river and lake, said William Hosley of Enfield, a cultural resource and marketing and development consultant who has studied Connecticut history for 34 years. There may have been native American trails in the area, but any other sign of human presence was unlikely, he said.

In 1714, with Connecticut still a colony, Henry Woodward moved from Lebanon to Columbia, buying the hill beside an area known as the Great Meadow, creating a farm whose history roughly parallels many of the changes in the Connecticut landscape over the centuries. By 1830, that hill was known as Woodward Hill.

"One of the first things he did was build a dam on the stream exiting the meadow, build a sawmill, and begin the process of deforestation that is such a part of the New England story," said Walter W. Woodward, a professor of history at UConn, the official Connecticut state historian, and a descendant of Henry Woodward.

The Woodward dam and sawmill was but one of many small-scale dams and mills erected mostly on smaller streams. The remains of some of them still can be found along rivers.

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When Forests Covered The Connecticut Landscape

SAN JOSE -- They were the Nia, the Pinta and the Santa Maria of Space Age movie theaters, a domed armada set sail across a landscape in which anything suddenly seemed possible.

At the time of its opening 50 years ago in a fallowed farm field, "looking like a flying saucer about to take off," Century 21 became the first theater in Northern California that challenged the imagination of moviegoers as much as the pictures that played there.

Now it's among the last of its kind standing. After a recent, dramatic showdown at City Hall, the cinematic spaceship that architect Vincent Raney designed for a "city obsessed with the future" looks likely to be saved because of its past. But a broader debate continues over just which parts of the Bay Area's history are truly historic: Raney's domes in Fremont and Oakland are already gone, and his Pleasant Hill theater gave way to the wrecking ball last year after a City Council vote, despite a last-minute campaign by preservationists to save it.

Raney built a dozen domes in the Bay Area, all for movie impresario Ray Syufy. The theater impresario agreed to locate San Jose's Century 21, 22 and 23 -- the original theater's round-roofed companions -- on 11.6 acres owned by the architect's family, which also controlled the adjacent Winchester Mystery House, the peaks and cupolas of its rooftop in stark counterpoint to the nearby dome star fleet.

"As this area grew and changed from agriculture to technology, these domes became an important emblem of that change," said Matthew Sutton, standing forlornly outside the now-closed Century 21, which opened in 1964 and closed on March 31. "They wanted to evoke the future and embrace the optimism of the Space Age, that postwar Camelot era." Sutton organized a Save the Domes Facebook page, which, along with a petition drive that drew more than 8,600 signatures on Change.org, was thought to have influenced the City Council's 7-4 vote on June 10 to grant landmark protection to Century 21.

Last year, a campaign to save the CinArts, Raney's dome in Pleasant Hill, fell one vote short when it went before City Council. During that debate, one woman warned council members that "once it's destroyed, like the Twin Towers, you don't see it anymore." In San Jose, an impassioned dome defender cautioned the council against committing "dome-icide."

Floating objects

For now, Century 21 has been spared that fate, but Century 22 and 23 appear unlikely to survive long enough to justify their names. Century 22 opened in 1966 as a single dome, followed a year later by Century 23. But as multiplexes began to replace single-screen theaters in the 1970s, Century 22 expanded to a Picasso-esque embarrassment of riches with three domes, each one with its own screen.

Unlike buildings that create a wall along the street, these were "object buildings," said architect Sally Zarnowitz, a former member of San Jose's planning department, "that lend themselves to floating in the landscape."

Century 21 was clearly the mother ship, with its unmistakable resemblance to the flying saucer that brought Klaatu and Gort to this planet in the 1951 sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Raney gave it a gaudy zigzag parapet that also evoked a merry-go-round, Zarnowitz said. "All of that played into the idea of leisure architecture in the '60s."

See original here:
San Jose's Century 21 theater: No place like dome

South Mumbai is well-known for its plush corporate offices, charming heritage structures, the dazzling Queen's Necklace, cultural and festive attractions, vibrant places of worship and other well-planned localities. But an overlooked feature of SoBO are the still-surviving pockets of greenery in an otherwise highly urbanised landscape.

Actually, what remains is but a minuscule part of the once verdant labyrinth of orchards, dense mangroves and lush moist deciduous forests on hill slopes. The early Portuguese described the city as "laden with fruits, flowers and dense tropical vegetation". Articles from the British era depicted in the Bombay Natural History Society's (BNHS) coffee table book, Living Jewels From The Indian Jungle talk about tigers coming from Malabar Hill to drink water at Gowalia Tank. It is said that when the pioneer of Bollywood, Dadasaheb Phalke, decided to shift to a house in Dadar, neighbours advised him against, calling it a "far-off jungle"!

Nevertheless, what remains is precious and worth visiting. The dense, green vegetation on Malabar Hill includes the canopy in Hanging Gardens, the slopes behind Babulnath Temple, the Tower Of Silence, and the sprawling acres of Raj Bhavan. This natural-cum-man-made forest includes gulmohar, desi badam, copperpod, mango, coconut, rain tree, jamun and jackfruit. It houses dozens of species of birds, including rose-ringed parakeet, coppersmith barbet, magpie-robin, golden oriole, peafowl and even a typical forest bird like brown-headed barbet. Mongoose and various snake species have been spotted.

Horniman Circle, nestled amongst heritage structures such as the Asiatic Library and Bombay House, is another soothing patch of emerald. A huge banyan tree along with coconut trees is conspicuous among our other green friends here. Close by, the premises of Chhatrapati Shivaji Museum (formerly Prince of Wales Museum) shelters beautiful specimens of baobab, ratangunj, mango, Chinese fishtail palm and jackfruit. The space in front of BNHS Hornbill House is decked with mahua, tabebuia and kadamb. Both flanks of the Oval Maidan have majestic specimens of wild almond, karanj and bottle palm. The Western Railway headquarter's premises has an elegant cannonball tree while the footpath in front of HPCL Petroleum House dons a purple hue with taman flowers in late summer.

The tree diversity in Sagar Upvan (Colaba), the shaded naval area further south, the green premises of some clubs near the Race Course, the dense mangroves along the 10kms Sewri-Mahul coast that support the flamingos, the lush tree cover on the Sion Fort hill, the mini forest in Maharashtra Nature Park (Dharavi) and the unique botanical heritage of Jijamata Udyan (Rani Baug) are some of the other green spaces that continue to grace the landscape of South Mumbai.

The writer is the Manager-Communications at Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS)

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South Mumbai's green heritage

SAN JOSE -- They were the Nia, the Pinta and the Santa Maria of Space Age movie theaters, a domed armada set sail across a landscape in which anything suddenly seemed possible.

At the time of its opening 50 years ago in a fallowed farm field, "looking like a flying saucer about to take off," Century 21 became the first theater in Northern California that challenged the imagination of moviegoers as much as the pictures that played there.

Now it's among the last of its kind standing. After a recent, dramatic showdown at City Hall, the cinematic spaceship that architect Vincent Raney designed for a "city obsessed with the future" looks likely to be saved because of its past. But a broader debate continues over just which parts of the Bay Area's history are truly historic: Raney's domes in Fremont and Oakland are already gone, and his Pleasant Hill theater gave way to the wrecking ball last year after a City Council vote, despite a last-minute campaign by preservationists to save it.

Raney built a dozen domes in the Bay Area, all for movie impresario Ray Syufy. The theater impresario agreed to locate San Jose's Century 21, 22 and 23 -- the original theater's round-roofed companions -- on 11.6 acres owned by the architect's family, which also controlled the adjacent Winchester Mystery House, the peaks and cupolas of its rooftop in stark counterpoint to the nearby dome star fleet.

"As this area grew and changed from agriculture to technology, these domes became an important emblem of that change," said Matthew Sutton, standing forlornly outside the now-closed Century 21, which opened in 1964 and closed on March 31. "They wanted to evoke the future and embrace the optimism of the Space Age, that postwar Camelot era." Sutton organized a Save the Domes Facebook page, which, along with a petition drive that drew more than 8,600 signatures on Change.org, was thought to have influenced the City Council's 7-4 vote on June 10 to grant landmark protection to Century 21.

Last year, a campaign to save the CinArts, Raney's dome in Pleasant Hill, fell one vote short when it went before City Council. During that debate, one woman warned council members that "once it's destroyed, like the Twin Towers, you don't see it anymore." In San Jose, an impassioned dome defender cautioned the council against committing "dome-icide."

Floating objects

For now, Century 21 has been spared that fate, but Century 22 and 23 appear unlikely to survive long enough to justify their names. Century 22 opened in 1966 as a single dome, followed a year later by Century 23. But as multiplexes began to replace single-screen theaters in the 1970s, Century 22 expanded to a Picasso-esque embarrassment of riches with three domes, each one with its own screen.

Unlike buildings that create a wall along the street, these were "object buildings," said architect Sally Zarnowitz, a former member of San Jose's planning department, "that lend themselves to floating in the landscape."

Century 21 was clearly the mother ship, with its unmistakable resemblance to the flying saucer that brought Klaatu and Gort to this planet in the 1951 sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Raney gave it a gaudy zigzag parapet that also evoked a merry-go-round, Zarnowitz said. "All of that played into the idea of leisure architecture in the '60s."

Read the original:
Bay Area domes face extinction