LaGuardia Design Group Offers 'Garden Dialogues' Tour and Conversations October 2

Three private residences in the Water Mill and Bridgehampton area will welcome guests to their gardens — all designed by LaGuardia Design Group of Water Mill — during an intimate tour on Sunday, October 2, sponsored by The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

The tour, which will begin at LaGuardia Design Group’s office, is part of the nonprofit foundation’s Garden Dialogues series, in which top landscape architects and their clients share the stories behind the creation of great landscapes.

“Some of these gardens have taken a couple of years and so there’s just good stories to be told,” said Christopher LaGuardia, the managing principal and founder of LaGuardia Design Group, as well as a member of The Cultural Landscape Foundation Board of Directors.

Leaders of LaGuardia Design Group, which also includes landscape architects Daniel Thorp and Ian Hanbach, will discuss their office’s own garden before a caravan of cars heads out to Longview, the first of the tour stops.

Longview has a country-casual vibe to it, LaGuardia said on Friday. He explained that the front yard is mostly meadow, though it gives way to more formality when getting closer to the traditional farmhouse-style home, with boxwoods. Then the casual feeling resumes in the backyard. “There’s a beautiful outdoor dining kitchen area,” he said. “The couple likes to entertain and have a beautiful pool area and pool house. And the property is quite long — that’s why they get the name Longview — but it doesn’t go long in back, it goes side to side.”

LaGuardia Design Group worked on Longview with Martin Sosa of architecture firm Arcologica and interior designer Robert Stilin, a trio that LaGuardia called a “good collaborative team.”

Just five houses away, LaGuardia Design Group and James Merrell Architects of Sag Harbor created Hayground.

“That was a really interesting project because it was a very long, deep lot,” LaGuardia recalled. “And we started the process with the client before the architect and laid out this site plan that’s very stretched out over the site with a tennis court, a main house — and then the pool and pool house are very remote from the house. But the siting of it gives the area a great view of Sayers Pond.”

The distance between the transitional-modern house and the pool means the owners don’t have to look at the pool year-round and there is a great recreation space between them, he said.

The property terraces away from the street through a series of level changes, he continued. “The pool house is probably a drop of 25 feet,” he said.

He noted that the landscape is very natural and mostly native, and embraces the bigger context of the pond.

While James Merrell Architects designed the house, LaGuardia Design Group did the pool house.

“We do a lot of structures like that that are out in the landscape,” LaGuardia said. “If it was closer to the house, I’d be wary because I don’t like to design anything architectural too close to the house. But this is so separate, it’s its own separate project.”

The topography and plantings of bayberries and meadow grasses hide the tennis court in the front yard, which opened up the opportunities out back.

“I don’t love tennis courts on properties because they take up so much room and dictate so much,” LaGuardia said. “So in this case, you’ll see a sunken court — you won’t see it, you drive right past it — and then you come to the house and then you go down, down. Everything keeps going down to the pool. Quite nice.”

Lastly, Cottage Garden is the site of an old cottage that was renovated and updated by James Merrell Architects and expanded with a modern, flat-roofed addition.

“It had a lot of existing trees on the property,” LaGuardia said. “But we did edit quite a few of them out, open it up.”

He said it is a nice “gardener’s garden,” compact, with a raised bed vegetable garden and wildflower meadow.

“I picked this site because the owner, Mary Singh, is very involved with the garden,” he said of why he chose it for the Garden Dialogues event. “… A lot of what we did with it to simply put the infrastructure in place — you know, the bones of the garden, the layout. But a lot of the planting beds and all were designed by her.”

Another contributer was Tony Piazza of Piazza Horticultural Group in Southampton

“So when you look at the design, it doesn’t look like, typically, one of our designs, but it’s much more garden-y — lots of perennials and things like that,” LaGuardia said. “But it’s part of the dialogue about designer and owner working together.”

This project had a great collaborative nature, while other clients may have just let his team do its own thing, he added.

The house itself is pushed to the back of the property so there is no real back yard, just a little walkway with sweetbay magnolias, a groundcover of Pennsylvania sedge, and some hayscented ferns, he said. “You can see the back garden from the windows, too. So it was important to have something to look out at.”

LaGuardia said Garden Dialogues programs happen all over the United States as a fundraising event for The Cultural Landscape Foundation, but also as a way of getting the organization’s message out and letting people know what it does: “Their big tagline is ‘connecting people to places,’ but really it’s about connecting people to their cultural heritage of where they live.”

The event begins at 11 a.m. on Sunday, October 2, and is limited to 25 to 30 guests. Admission is $200 and includes a signed copy of the design group’s monograph, “Contemporary Gardens of the Hamptons.” Register at tclf.org/garden-dialogues-2022-water-mill-ny.