A Sustainability That Aims to Seduce

When Kenneth Hillan and his partner, Duncan Robertson, requested that an 80-foot lap pool be built in the hilltop meadow outside their new Marin County, Calif., house several years ago, Bernard Trainor, a garden designer known for ecology-minded landscapes, could have balked. At first glance, the wild meadow and the unspoiled views seemed to cry out for a conservationist approach. And the clients had been clear that they wanted the garden areas “to look completely natural, almost like California was before it had been farmed,” as Mr. Hillan put it.

The swimming pool was their first real request, Mr. Trainor said, and since they were into competitive swimming and he “knew it wouldn’t have to be a suburban-style pool for people to lounge around all day,” he embraced it as a challenge.

The resulting design, built in 2005, set a minimalist, carved-concrete, solar-heated pool almost seamlessly into the meadow, where it is surrounded by seasonal wildflowers and native grasses (planted mainly with seeds collected from the site before construction began) and reflects the surrounding hills like a ground-level mirror.

Three years later, the plantings have begun to mature, restoring the property to something close to its original state and providing its weekender owners with low-maintenance natural beauty.

With its combination of scrupulous planting, formal as opposed to naturalistic design elements, and responsiveness to the clients’ desires — even when they strayed from strict conservationism — the Hillan-Robertson project is typical of an emerging movement in environmentally conscious landscape and garden design.



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