The Outside Story

During their two decades in Rustic Canyon, Cydney and Gary Mandel had revamped their 1920s house twice before considering its relationship to the garden. In the third and final remodeling, San Francisco architect Tom Goodwin made the outdoors into pictures using glass walls and French doors and Santa Monica garden designer Nancy Power created garden rooms to lure people outside. Organizing the landscape, Power worked with the bold volumes of the building, creating functional patios, as well as walks, steps and understated fountains. L.A. architectural designer Clive Bridgwater conceived finishing touches--such as stacked stone walls and a freestanding fireplace that warms a terrace behind the house. Now, in place of the soggy lawn the Mandels seldom used, they have an outdoor kitchen and dining room, plus ample space for open-air lounging and parties.

For planting help, the Mandels turned to Pasadena landscape architect Denis Kurutz. Their emphasis, Cydney says, was on "serenity, with an exotic twist." Given heavy shade from existing sycamores and other trees, the logical plant choices were common--"like impatiens," Cydney recalls. But she and her husband, both avid travelers, had memories of Balinese bamboos, Hawaiian bromeliads and large-leafed tropicals from Indonesia. They wanted to de-emphasize flowers and showcase foliage in mass plantings that would stand up against their tall, geometric house.

Kurutz's focus was to assemble the wide variety of plants and make them all work in harmony with the setting. "It's cool and wet here in this canyon, and ferns speak to that," he says. "So do strap-leafed plants, from mondo grass around paving stones to giant crinum lilies." Eye-catching accents include a yellow-striped bamboo, visible from the dining room; fiery orange epidendrums planted along a hillside walk above; and yellow kangaroo paws beside the pool in front of the house. "In certain areas, we sought relief from green," says Kurutz, who delighted in hunting down character plants, such as Dalechampia dioscoreifolia, a vine with bat-shaped purple blooms.

With the plants in place and growing strong, the Mandels are busy furnishing their verdant rooms. They found a granite pedestal in China for their outdoor living room, a marble-topped table in Paris and a pair of upholstered lounging chairs at Blackman Cruz, a shop on La Cienega Boulevard. In dry weather, Cydney unrolls a sisal rug in front of the fireplace and, in the cool evenings, she sets floor lamps and heaters amid the chairs. "In the beginning," she says, "I resisted all the paving. But it's made the garden usable. Instead of seeing it from a distance, we're out there all the time."