Nearly nine years ago, after Andrew and Kathleen Blank of Park City, Utah, purchased a one-and-a-half-acre vineyard property west of Healdsburg, they learned that it sits on a floodplain. Neighboring creeks and the Russian River periodically spill over during heavy rains, so—on the advice of their former interior designer, Claudia Garcia—they brought in landscape architect Dustin Moore of the San Francisco firm Strata to develop a master plan.
Having worked on several wine country gardens, Moore was already familiar with the terrain. The site featured an existing contemporary Craftsman-style home on its southwest corner, but little else beyond a half-acre vineyard at the northern edge, planted with Côtes du Rhône varietals: Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre.
With flooding in mind, Moore proposed placing an informal “party barn” and a protected, elevated pool—“like a long horse trough”—running west to east between the house and the vineyard.
“Andrew had described how they wanted to entertain friends and family during their time in Wine Country,” Moore recalls. The couple enjoyed swimming laps, and “he is an avid cyclist. After cycling events, he wanted to meet the others over a glass of wine around a pool.”
In Park City, the Blanks couldn’t enjoy the kind of indoor-outdoor lifestyle that California’s climate allows—let alone a vegetable garden close to the main house, which was also on their wish list.
In keeping with the agricultural and farm-inspired idiom established by the barn and the 75-foot-long pool, Moore designed a shade structure just south of the pool, topped with a corrugated steel shed roof, as well as a fire pit surrounded by armchairs for cooler evenings.
Along the way, the Blanks hired the Seattle-based firm Olson Kundig to design the entertainment structure, which evolved into a modernist, barn-like silhouette developed by project architect Paul Schlachter in collaboration with Moore. Its six-inch-wide vertical wood siding inspired Moore to use similarly scaled boards to form the concrete walls around the pool, lending the garden—completed just last summer—an unexpected Brutalist edge. A folly resembling an aqueduct arches over the eastern end of the extra-long pool, adding another board-formed concrete counterpoint to the barn. “It pulls the eye across the property,” Moore notes—and conveniently obscures some dilapidated structures on a neighboring parcel.
The rest of the garden is softened with hardy sweeps of sesleria and miscanthus grasses, which require only light irrigation and minimal upkeep. Some flowering gaura, grasslike and delicate, was planted between the garden and the vineyard because, as Moore explains, “you want to attract bees for grapes.” Spaced concrete pavers and fragrant ground cover along the walking paths help keep the garden pervious.
“It is a very minimalist expression throughout,” Moore says. “Even the plants we chose use less water than most succulents.”
