SANTA ANA, Calif. - "We're just three gals who bought a house together and agreed not to wait forever to do the landscaping of our dreams," Lorraine Saunders explained.
The goal of the three women, who did much of the work themselves on the Ladera Ranch, Calif., home?
"To create a 'grand' feeling with an average-size home," Ms. Saunders said.
Along the way, Ms. Saunders and her partners, twins Melisa and Melanie French, learned important lessons.
How to "go with the flow of colors" and adapt their plan to the existing landscaping.
How to combine hardscaping - stone, brick, concrete or whatever - to mesh with a home's exterior.
How to make a home's exterior colors and style flow into the house.
Ms. Saunders and Melisa French work at Quest Diagnostics Nichols Institute in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. Melanie French is with the Guidant Corp. in Newport Beach, Calif.
"We bought this house 1 years ago and wanted to make it feel like a secure, warm home that we could enjoy for a long time," Ms. Saunders said.
The house the three women bought is on a corner, but a bit unusual in that it fronts on both streets. Its front, or main entrance, is on one street. A side driveway, garage and double-door entrance to the kitchen/dining area face the adjacent street.
Like many houses in Ladera Ranch, it has a traditional design, in this case a Colonial style. The main entrance is framed in a carved white wood, and the front of the house is done in stone.
"The house looked pretty Colonial to me," Ms. Saunders said, "so we went with pretty straight lines."
"We went for cool tones (pale blues and greens) with the outside and inside of the house," she said.
They extended the lighter look to the concrete in the front, having it acid-washed and a lacquer applied. They also carried the colors inside with pale blues and greens.
The bulk of the landscaping and hardscaping was done in four distinct "zones":
l The formal front entrance yard
l A large side yard with driveway and garage facing a side street
l Another side yard featuring a unique arbor system and patio furniture
l A hardscaped back yard with a small slope
The small formal entrance yard is divided by a stone walk between the sidewalk and the house. It had been a plain concrete walk. They added the stone. The color of the stone comes close to the color of the faux stone that makes up most of the home's exterior on that side of the house. Two short pillars, also covered by stone, sport ornamental electric lamps.
"The front of the house we wanted to have elegant and to look like it was a miniature estate (with the illusion of rolling lawns) in keeping with the Colonial appearance at the front of the house," Melanie French said.
A small grassy area on both sides of the walk up to the front door has flowers and shrubs with a meandering border between them and the grass.
The driveway side of the house features a mix of stonework on the ground and the house, white-painted window trim and a double-door entrance to the kitchen/dining area.
For the side yard that doesn't face the street, the trio created a private retreat. To provide a sense of a separate area, the women had five large arbors installed across the area.
"The arches we put in to the side yard give the space (and it's a small space) more (of a feeling of) size and dimension," Ms. Saunders said.
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