In the Garden with Larry Carlson

Larry Carlson’s Bridgehampton garden is all about connections. Not the kind that get people ahead in business or society. Far from it. Mr. Carlson has created a garden that fosters connections of a very different sort.

He is concerned with connecting the garden with his house, with people connecting to one another there, with individuals connecting to nature through the garden and with the inner self connecting to the timeless and eternal, indeed, to the universe.

Twenty years ago, Mr. Carlson and his wife, jazz singer Jody Carlson, bought a 5-acre plot in the middle of a potato farm. No one else lived there, and around them was flat farmland. Their friends thought they were crazy, but Mr. Carlson had a vision of what he could create on that piece of land and he set about realizing it. There were wide-open vistas—“in winter we could see all the way to the ocean from here,” he said. And there were magnificent sunsets.

Mr. Carlson had gone to architecture school, and although his work was designing cable television systems instead of buildings (he’s had a 30-year career with Time Warner and Home Box Office), he designed the house in Bridgehampton for his young family. The Carlsons’ children, two and four years old at the time, are grown now.

His design for the house was inspired by travels in Italy: he wanted to re-create the welcoming feeling

of country villas there. The one-story house in the potato fields would be surrounded by gardens that would unite it with the land. To take advantage of the splendid sunsets and to capture passing breezes, Mr. Carlson set the house on an angle, rather than perpendicular to the property lines as most houses are situated. To merge the space inside the house with the outdoor space around it, the house has 30 French doors, and brick floors that flow right out onto a courtyard paved with the same brick. (All the brick—10,000 square feet of it—was laid by one man who lived in a trailer on the property with his wife while he worked on the house.) In summer the doors and windows are thrown open to the sun and air, and house and garden become one.

The garden surrounding the house has evolved over its 20-year history. For Mr. Carlson, the house and garden offer a series of “coming-in’s” in the Italian manner. He began by planting 25 young, now stately, multi-trunked maple trees to frame the long driveway. “That’s the first coming-in,” he explains. At the end of the driveway is a pair of stone columns with a blue gate marking the entry to the garden and house, with two Russian olives, pruned to look like real olive trees, just inside.

“That’s the second coming-in,” Mr. Carlson said.

A short drive leads into a forecourt, with space for parking.

The house is framed by arbors covered with trumpet vines. It’s a welcoming entry, leafy and cool in summer, and offering a sculptural line in winter. A warm natural light permeates the L-shaped house, which wraps around the brick courtyard, with a swimming pool in the center. A row of potted boxwoods sheared into neat globes stands along its length. Along with small beds of peegee hydrangeas, and more boxwoods, they help to soften the expanse of brick in the courtyard.

On the other side of the pool is a cozy walled alcove with a dining table and chandelier.

“It’s the best room in the house,” Mr. Carlson declared. “It’s 10 degrees cooler than anyplace else.”

In late summer, clethra bushes perfume the air with their gently sweet fragrance. Everywhere in the courtyard there are places to sit, to gather and talk. And there are often people visiting. In fact, the name of the place, Villa des Amis, was suggested by two perceptive friends who noted that Mr. Carlson had built the place for them as much as for his family.

“I’m happy to have people come and go,” Mr. Carlson said. In addition to family and friends, the Carlsons have hosted plenty of visual artists and musicians over the years. And no wonder: Villa des Amis is a comfortable, welcoming place to be. In fact, the highest compliment Mr. Carlson gets is when guests remark how comfortable the house and garden are, he said.

A left turn off the courtyard leads into the garden, where Mr. Carlson has created spaces that encourage a deep connection to the natural world. “I’m not a plantsman,” he said. “I like to create spaces.” In fact, he explained, he and his wife have edited out a lot of the color over the years, in favor of more green, serene spaces.

The garden is designed as a series of rooms that open off a central “hall” entered from the courtyard (another coming-in). The hall is a long, straight grass path defined by tall hedges of privet and shorter boxwood on either side, with vine-covered arbors serving as doorways to the rooms. In the center of the hall is a rectangular reflecting pool inhabited by frogs and goldfish. Set into the ground before it is a smooth gray stone on which an inscription is carved: “A garden should owe its charms to secret realms and hidden meeting places, laying siege to a unity you sense but cannot find.” The quote is from a biography of the legendary French landscape designer Andre Le Notre by Erik Orsenna and Moishe Black, and it describes the garden Mr. Carlson has aimed to create here.

The first garden room, off the right of the hall, is a small peach orchard. A bit farther on, a “window” cut into the hedge reveals a view of cherry trees (the very first plants Mr. Carlson put in) and beyond them a boxwood garden with a series of geometric beds framed with neatly clipped boxwoods and planted with herbs and flowers.

Walk a bit farther along the hall and a doorway created by an arbor covered with yellow trumpet vine beckons you to discover an 11-circuit labyrinth cut into a lawn. At its beginning is another gray stone with a quotation, this one from T.S. Eliot:

“In the beginning is our end

In our end is the beginning.”

The three-year-old labyrinth is a copy of one that can be found in the cathedral in Chartres, France, as a mosaic in the floor. Mr. Carlson took a photo when he visited the original, and used it to reimagine the labyrinth here, in the grass. He laid it out with stakes and string and mows the paths himself once a week. Walking the labyrinth, Mr. Carlson explained, is a meditative experience, a spiritual journey.

“I’m always intrigued with things that are spiritual,” he said. “A garden should be a spiritual place. In wandering it you feel a connection to nature.” If we allow ourselves to feel this sense of connection, he explained, we come to realize that we are ourselves part of nature. “Ultimately what that does is you really find yourself.”

In the center of the labyrinth is a bench, and a stone with a quotation from Zenrin Kushi, a 14th century Chinese scholar:

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing,

Spring comes, and

The grass grows by itself.”

The inscription stones appear in various spots in the garden. All of them were carved by the Modlich Brothers in Ohio, whom Mr. Carlson found on the internet. Another very fitting quotation, from E.M. Forster, found on another stone in the garden, is “only connect.”

At the end of the hall is a walled courtyard with a periwinkle blue door, a favorite color of the Carlsons, with echoes of Provence and the American Southwest. That blue is repeated in architectural elements of the house and garden, a unifying theme. The courtyard is an intimate space in which to sit and soak up the sun, enriched in summer with the fragrance of the roses that cover its stucco walls. On one side of the courtyard is Mr. Carlson’s airy, bright studio where some of his exquisitely rendered portraits and figure drawings hang on the walls. Mr. Carlson studied art after leaving HBO, and he enjoys portraiture, aiming to capture the spirit as well as the physical likeness of his subjects.

Double doors open from the studio onto the “great lawn,” an expanse of grass framed with a composition of shrubs punctuated with slender arborvitaes that take the place of the cypresses found in Italian gardens.

As he gazed across the great lawn one recent afternoon, Mr. Carlson said “I think I’ve got a new idea” for the next stage of the garden’s evolution. He thinks he may create several large circles of stone, set into the ground—one in the great lawn, a second in the wildflower meadow beyond it, and a third still farther away, across the drive. In the center of each stone circle would be one of the inscription stones. Surrounding the central stone would be more stones set in concentric circles emanating outward like ripples in a pond.

The circles of stone would create a visual link to the labyrinth, and would enhance the spiritual, contemplative nature of the garden. Mr. Carlson wants to inspire visitors to think about their place in the universe. “What we say matters and it ripples out. It actually affects the whole universe.”

As E.M. Forster said, “only connect.”