Point Break
Landscape Designer Scott Shrader's Ode to Rincon and Outdoor Living
Alexandra Vorbeck with landscape designer Scott Shrader and guests often take advantage of the local logs and other items washed up to the beach to create perfect backrests for seating.
Photography by Lisa Romerein
Shrader's The Art of Outdoor Living (Rizzoli, 2019
Alexandra Vorbeck loves transforming properties as much as—maybe even more than—I do. She is always looking for another challenge. When she found this beach house property north of Los Angeles, she could not resist. The entire property was in very sad shape. The county had recently condemned the house—relocated from Carpinteria in the 1960s—which had been built on sand without any footings or foundations and added on to haphazardly over the years. The existing gardens included only one semi-functional outdoor space, a pagoda. A sunken pond occupied the actual sweet spot for commanding the view, a long vista to one of California’s great surf breaks. But the location—just a short walk from the beachfront, and next to a tidal lagoon—was perfection. Vorbeck imagined turning it into her own private Idaho of a retreat to share with family and friends: the ultimate, California-casual getaway, suited to a dress code of T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops.
To be here is to want to interact with the water, air, and views, day and night, from all points on the property. To make that possible we used materials that bring the feeling of the shore right up to the threshold of the house and visually extend the experience of the living spaces to the beach and water beyond.
“Beyond the walls, we casually integrated environments conducive to lounging, casual dining, conversation, and just hanging out.”
In order to give direction to the large gestures and small details of our redesign, I developed a story of a tsunami landing on the house. When it passed, it left the house engulfed in an almost accidental landscape of randomly scattered boulders (in a practical touch, these serve as impromptu seating), drifts of sand, and an assemblage of boardwalks that tie the house and gardens together. Working with architect CJ Poane, we opened up the interior of the house with axial views, focal points, and moments that reflect the ocean, and we planked the walls and ceilings (picking up the boardwalk theme) to create easy, breezy, light-filled rooms visibly in synch with the surroundings. Beyond the walls, we casually integrated environments conducive to lounging, casual dining, conversation, and just hanging out—a fire pit, an easy area for four to six to share a meal, play cards, or shuck oysters; a larger lounge area for bigger groups, plus, of course, the numerous boulders that offer incidental places to sit or put down a drink.
Since we wanted a random effect, it did not make sense to plot every single plant and every single position obsessively. We knew the plant palette had to consist of drought-tolerant salt-lovers native to California. We knew we would create an arbor of fig trees off Vorbeck's master bedroom and find a worthy specimen—which turned out to be a strawberry guava—to commemorate the birth of her first granddaughter. I sketched in the boardwalks with a can of spray paint. We figured out the basic structure for the landscape. With four large trees—including a spectacular, mature Monterey cypress—still standing proud, we began to shape our vision with the understory, arranging Metrosideros to grow into a hand-clipped screen around the property’s perimeter. Interspersed are 15 additional Monterey cypress trees intended to add, eventually, impressive tall shafts of green.
While the house and garden were still in construction, Vorbeck held a “naming” party to select a moniker for the house. The unanimous favorite? The Sandbox. We have now guided The Sandbox through the process of becoming for more than five years. As it continues to mature over the next 30 or 40 years, my hope is that it will be demonstrated that we’ve planned well for its future—and that, with care, it will only continue to grow more and more into its best self.
