Los Angeles-based design firm Breland-Harper is responsible for some of our favorite projects, the kind of unfussy and airy, European-inflected homes with windows and back doors that always seem to be open to a garden of some sort. This is their unique talent: the ability to design homes that are in constant conversation with the world just outside it. “The integration of architectural, interior, and landscape design within our studio is a founding tenet of our practice,” they say on their website.
Which is why we’re excited to share co-founder Peter Harper’s Quick Takes today. For Peter, gardens, just like the rooms inside a home, are opportunities to communicate a mood and a viewpoint. His work—whether it’s designing a building, decorating a room, or drawing up with a planting scheme—is always effortless and unassuming. “Restraint is key—from considering every aspect of a project’s distinct identity before intervening to recognizing that a design need not be loud or extensive to be impactful,” he says.
“Gardens are what we bring to them— imagination, poetry, romance,” he goes on. “What an exquisite medium in which to communicate.” We couldn’t agree more.
Above: Peter (at right), pictured with partner Michael Breland, has a masters in both historic preservation and architecture. Photograph by Simon Upton.
Your first garden memory:
Reading with my sister—we were perhaps three and four—under a weeping ornamental cherry tree in the garden of the first house I remember (the same tree was tied with bows in pink and blue when we were both born).
Garden-related book you return to time and again:
Edith Wharton and Maxfield Parrish’s Italian Villas and their Gardens. Truly some of the most beautiful drawings of anything, in particular of gardens, ever produced. And Russell Page’s The Education of A Gardener, for its beauty, honesty, and inspiration.
Instagram account that inspires you:
@nigelslater. What he has done on a very urban plot of land is magical.
Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.
Above: A lush landscape for a Pasadena project. Photograph by Nils Timm.
Romantic. Historicist. Wild.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Antique/garden Roses—really, in any color. Sometimes in life we are bombarded by facsimiles of beautiful things (hothouse roses, florist roses, red Valentine’s Day roses) and when you encounter the real thing—the form, the scent, and the color of the real thing—swoon.
Plant that makes you want to run the other way:
Beyond some rather virulent weeds I encounter daily, I will give you two: the pencil cactus and foxtail ferns. I am perhaps not enlightened enough yet to appreciate their beauty of utility in a garden composition.
Favorite go-to plant:
Above: Tall bay laurel trees (Laurus nobilis) flank the outdoor sitting area of this Silver Lake home. Photograph by Justin Chung, from Italianate Minimalism in Silver Lake by Breland-Harper.
Laurus nobilis—a favorite hedge, treasured for its deep green leaf and dignified form. We cannot forget the upright rosemary—loose or clipped, it is incredibly durable and performs so well in a Californian garden. It is also a favorite low hedge. The two together are magic and signal home to me.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
You will lose things that you love in the garden—trees, wildlife, views, etc. These losses also become opportunities.
Unpopular gardening opinion:
Climbers are exquisite additions to most houses—people are so afraid of them carrying a house off its foundation. Also, bees have the right of way.
Gardening or design trend that needs to go:
Above: Breland-Harper restored and renovated a 1920s boarding house, converting it into a creative office space. Mexican fence post cacti, a ‘Sapphire Skies’ beaked yucca, and a white flowering frangipani grow in a sunny spot in its courtyard. Photograph by TBC.
