A Garden Narrative
Landscape designer Scot Eckley breathes new life into a Mercer Island garden.
Written by Debra Prinzing
Photographed by Alex Hayden
GRAY Magazine April-May 2012
Imagine writing a short story to describe each destination in your landscape. That’s how landscape designer Scot Eckley of Seattle-based Scot Eckley Inc. approached a commission to renovate a mismatched series of patios, decks and terraces surrounding his clients’ contemporary Mercer Island home.
The professional couple loved the seclusion their sunrise-facing property offered, but its outdoor spaces did nothing to lure them there. Tucked into a heavily wooded area and perched at the end of a precarious driveway, the home had initially received some interior renovations. By 2010, the owners turned their focus to the landscape, where an earlier design was dominated by more than 40 huge containers that cluttered the grounds like paratroopers dropped from the sky. What the property – and its residents – needed was harmony and order.
Perennials and small evergreen shrubs add vivid color to the “champagne courtyard,” while water flows along a stainless steel runnel into a carved stone slab.
Eckley suggested a master plan for the three-acre hillside property to work in tandem with the new driveway, auto court and garage/guest quarters designed by Seattle architect Michael K. Gibson. Eckley used elegant details to better define the outdoor living spaces and suggested low-maintenance ornamental shrubs and Northwest natives reminiscent of Mercer Island’s wilder places for the ravine, walking trails and perimeter borders.
Landscape designer Scot Eckley widened the entry path so two can walk comfortably side-by-side. The approach is more welcoming because the pale golden granite plank walkway extends outward to the auto court.
During the design process, Eckley and his clients “ended up giving names to all the different decks, corridors and spaces,” he explains. At first this shorthand ensured that everyone was referring to the same place for planning purposes, but soon the labels morphed into charming descriptions of the emotional experience each offered.
Eckley reconfigured outdoor destinations to better relate to their corresponding indoor rooms — including a now-gracious entry garden, a sunken patio where a gentle rill of water streams from a stainless-steel channel into a granite receptacle (“champagne courtyard”) and a living room-sized deck with a fire table at its center (“martini deck”). Two upper decks became the “salsa garden,” where zesty edibles grow in pots, and the “San Diego deck,” a private place for husband and wife to relax.
The areas now “seems to be an extension of the easy comfort that we’ve tried to infuse in our home,” the wife says. “The landscape actually finishes the interior of our house. I love every room, but I have to say that when I walk into any of them, I feel like I need to go and peek out of the windows to be fully satisfied.”
Eckley oriented the new materials horizontally to echo the home’s “strong lines,” such as the beveled siding. This visual trick gives a common language to dark-stained ironwood panels, screens and sliding gates; pale golden granite planks lining the entry walk; similarly-hued, reclaimed Chinese granite bands on the patio floor and Trex decking in the high-traffic areas.
Streamlined furnishings and impactful plantings relate one area to the next. Eckley specified nearly-black, all-weather rattan furniture and worked with a custom fabricator to design a sleek black bench with a geometric cast aluminum base for the home’s entry.
The plantings are mostly evergreen: soothing and un-fussy swaths of lily turf and Mt. Vernon laurel line
the entry walk and draw the eye to a massive copper-hued vessel containing a sculptural Stewartia tree.
The water-facing deck has a beachy touch thanks to drifts of bronze carex, an ornamental grass with metallic hues. Two weathered steel planters contain specimen-sized full-moon Japanese maple trees, which are up-lit at night.
A textural flower and foliage tapestry brightens the champagne courtyard, where raised stone and Cor-Ten steel planters bring orange-red, dark pink, purple, yellow and blue-hues to eye level, in all four seasons. “It’s their special gem-like moment of color, energy and beauty,” he says.
Indeed, for his clients, the new landscape is a beneficent gift to celebrate their life together. Eckley and his crew completed the renovations just weeks before the owners were married last September – in an intimate, garden wedding. “We got married on the martini deck with the trees in the backdrop acting like a kind of natural chapel,” says the wife. “We couldn’t imagine a more magical location.”
who: Scot Eckley
what: Landscape designer
details: Scot Eckley Inc. is a Seattle-based landscape design-build firm specializing in custom residential projects. Its principle, Scot Eckley, is passionate about creating and building long-lasting, finely-crafted gardens integrating plants, stone, water and other distinct features. He brings a trained designer’s eye to the challenges and details of landscape construction.