Room for rest and play
When landscape designer Becky Bourdeau first visited Miriam Yoo and Ryan Cooper’s Mid-City backyard, it was like an empty void. ¶ With its swath of dead lawn and concrete pads, the barren yard was at odds with the warmth and charm of the 1928 Spanish bungalow.
“You walked out there and there was no sense of definition, or flow,” Bourdeau says. “You didn’t know where to spend time or set up furniture.”
After living in condominiums, Yoo, 36, and Cooper, 37, were excited to own their first home and have an opportunity to entertain outdoors.
California’s long-running drought, however, prompted them to stop watering the lawns, hire Bourdeau, Potted’s in-house landscape designer, and rethink the yard as a low-water multiuse space.
“Our main objective was to create a place to congregate,” says Yoo, who recently left her job as an entertainment attorney to open the wine and lifestyle store Flask & Field at Row DTLA. “When we entertain, it’s either a group of four to six or it’s 30 people. ”
“We are homebodies,” adds Cooper, who is head of production at Fullscreen. “We wanted a place where we can host our friends. “
Bourdeau attacked the backyard by dividing the lot into “logical segments.”
A new pergola and concrete patio attached to the garage create a cozy outdoor living room complete with couches, chairs and a coffee table.
Behind the garage, a small strip of lawn serves as a dog run for the couple’s two pooches.
Inexpensive concrete block pavers, pea gravel and decomposed granite circulate throughout the yard and connect the “rooms” to give the backyard a modern aesthetic.
Lavender, bougainvillea and yellow kangaroo paws add color while boldly textured golden barrel cactus, prickly pear and agave stand out in the planting beds.
“All of the living spaces were rectangular,” Bourdeau says. “By crafting beds with organic edges, it softens the spaces.”
Fruitless olive trees provide screening between “rooms” and help to define an open space where the couple and their friends play the popular beanbag toss game cornhole. “I like the sense of intimacy that is created out there,” Bourdeau says. “It’s a flexible space and can be whatever they want.”
Next to it, the couple park their Volkswagen Vanagon on visually pleasing strips of concrete.
In front, Bourdeau kept the existing brick walkway and added drought-tolerant plants in bold shapes and color — aloes and pink flowering calandrinia — and gravel.
Before they began, the couple budgeted around $25,000 for the project. In the end, they spent roughly twice that amount, including plants, installation, designer fees, lighting, furniture, contractor’s fees, materials, labor, stucco and structural changes to the garage.
The backyard no longer feels like a cavernous lot, but an intimate space where the couple can have coffee together, putter, and visit with their two dogs.
“We love spending time out there,” says Cooper, who built a potting table and vegetable planter along with the cornhole set. “It’s therapeutic.”
Adds Yoo: “We view it as an investment in ourselves.”