Up Front & Personal

Written by Jane Garmey • Photographed by Marion Brenner
Produced By Diane Dorrans Saeks

Photo: Marion Brenner

See the garden

When garden designer Scott Colombo was a boy, he often visited his grandparents in their Spanish-style bungalow on a quiet street in San Rafael, California. The house was set on less than half an acre, and a circular driveway with room for three cars occupied the entire front yard. As a child, he had not been the least bit bothered by this arrangement, but by the time he and his wife, Becket, purchased the house in 1999, his perspective had changed entirely: The father of two young children, he wanted a front yard that his family could use and enjoy, not a parking lot. "The house was designed by my grandmother and came with a lot of personal history, so remodeling it took awhile, and that gave me time to think about the first garden I've ever made for myself."

Privacy from the street was an important priority. So Colombo designed a low, mortared limestone wall, less than four feet high and built of yellow Osage stone from Oklahoma, to run the full 100-foot length of the property. Its jigsaw-like pattern gives definition to the garden within and visual interest from the street outside. The wall is bisected in the center by a high wooden gate with open ironwork grills that Colombo designed himself, using as his inspiration an antique gate he had seen in France. Its style relates to the Mediterranean look of the house and is directly centered on the front door and bordered on each side by an eight-foot-high limestone column topped with a decorative stone ball.

MORE GARDENING ARTICLES