Garden Rooms

Margaret Roach reports on “garden rooms” (“The Art of Making Garden Rooms,” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/10/realestate/the-art-of-making-garden-rooms.html) in The New York Times.

She focuses on the development of the Sakonnet Garden, “a private landscape in coastal Rhode Island” and her work makes it clear that creating a compelling environment outdoors and with plants is a lot like using wallpapers, rugs, upholstery of different sorts, etc., to create wonderful interior spaces—and just as complicated (maybe even more so as plants can die but sofas no matter how ugly rarely do, they just fade away):

“John Gwynne and Mikel Folcarelli’s points of creative reference are wide-ranging. The defined rooms of traditional English gardens are an influence in the Little Compton [that’s where the Sakonnet Garden is located]  garden. So is the Color Field theory of the pioneering modernist artist Josef Albers, whose bold squares of pigment were intensified in the context of carefully chosen adjacent ones.”