New Garden Design by Zahid Sardar

Author:Zahid Sardar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Published: 2008-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

A view of the McEvoy olive groves interspersed with lavender, herb gardens and fruit trees.

The pagoda-style pavilion designed by Babey Moulton Jue & Booth (BAMO) has more skinks slithering up its copper roof. In the background, the hillsides are covered with olive groves.

In this evolving 550-acre paradeisos of classical proportions, McEvoy dreamed of a pavilion to host those visitors. Soon, interior designers Babey Moulton Jue & Booth (BAMO) conjured up a forty-two-foot-high Chinese pagoda with giant copper lizards on its roof, because skinks, real lizards, that lurk among the olives are a source of delight for McEvoy’s grandchildren and have become the symbol and logo of the McEvoy ranch.

Michael Booth, in charge of the pavilion design, looked at the Tabernacle, a Methodist center with a delicate silhouette built on Martha’s Vineyard in 1879, as a model. Responding also to McEvoy’s fondness for chinoiserie, Booth referenced a Chinese teahouse in Rhode Island, at Alva Vanderbilt’s Marble House, and created an amalgam of the two to suit the pastoral setting. The result, closer in feeling to the Chinese Tea House at Sans Souci near Berlin, is an octagonal pavilion with wide openings and fits well amid redwoods, olive groves and open hilly terrain.

This elaborate tent, of resawn cedar boards and a pagoda-style roof of copper, will weather naturally to gray and verdigris. Steel doors designed by Jefferson Mack will help to keep out ocean fog. The metal roof required a different kind of smithery, so Booth found Larry Stearns of Vermont, who restores capitol domes, to create copper shingles to replicate clay Chinese tiles. The giant skinks for the roof, according to Booth, were Stearns’ idea.

They became so popular with the McEvoys, skink-shaped bronze handles for the doors and wall sconces in the shape of dragons were added inside. In this reptilian fantasy, tile paving and river rock used in pathways in Chinese gardens are embedded in the pavilion floor in a geometric pattern.

Above this showy carpet, interior details are deliberately subtle and yet grand. The ceiling, of beaded boards, is draped like billowing fabric, and the underside of the cupola is painted blue like a patch of sky. Wood and silk lanterns suspended from the ceiling—like oil lamps in Moorish buildings—add a flickering glow to the pavilion—a destination in the vast, sylvan landscape even on foggy nights.

Newspaper heiress Nan McEvoy’s penchant for chinoiserie is fully realized inside her garden pavilion. Its wood-clad ceiling, shaped in billowing folds like a tent canopy, has copper-and-bronze light fittings as well as silk lanterns hanging from it, and the floor, an elaborate mosaic of stone and tile, is derived from Chinese originals.

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