Parrish's 'Landscape Pleasures Tour Mixes Gardens With Interior Design"

It’s no coincidence that the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton hosts its annual “Landscape Pleasures” garden tour the second week of June every year.

“Roses begin to bloom, no benefit fatigue has set in, but most importantly, it’s when gardens look their best out here,” said co-chair and landscape architect Perry Guillot during a telephone interview on Tuesday, May 31. “People like flowers, and that’s the best week to see them.”

This year’s horticulture event is all about relating landscapes to residences, Mr. Guillot explained. And on Saturday, June 11, four in-

terior designers—William Sofield, Alexa Hampton, Mario Buatta and Charlotte Moss—will broadly explore the topic during a symposium, offering tips and pointers along the way.

“They each have a radically different take and their body of work is altogether different,” Mr. Guillot said. “Gardens are meant for people. People live in houses. That bridge between the two is the topic. I doubt they’ll get into varieties of roses and be specific about it, and I hope they won’t. They have free rein. It’ll be interesting what they come up with. I hope they meet the challenge.”

During a telephone interview on Thursday, June 2, Mr. Sofield said he isn’t participating in the lecture for his love of public speaking.

“I’m actually extremely shy,” he said. “It was more because so much of my work is influenced by gardens and landscape, and I rarely have an opportunity to think of it that way.”

Above all, Mr. Sofield tries to apply a very firm sense of place to every home he designs, he said. A house in Colorado would look extremely different from a cottage in Maine or a New York City apartment, he said, thanks to their surroundings and, in some cases, residential gardens.

“It’s both ways, a house and a garden inspiring one another,” he said. “My biggest fear is boredom. I think in Southampton, a lot of the times these are second homes, so you want a different experience. Don’t play it safe, make it different from the city, make it a sensual experience.”

Usually, Mr. Sofield said, it’s the garden that influences the interior design. But in his case, his second home in Southampton, “Balcastle,” is a historical one and the garden was completely inspired by it, he said.

“It’s a haphazard adventure, it’s grand and overgrown,” he said of the garden. “Even though it’s brand new, it has a sense of age. Ironically, I spent all last weekend slaving away making it look haphazard. It’s so much more work to make it look casual, but a perfectly groomed garden isn’t necessarily the most relaxing place. You want it to feel like home.”

Mr. Sofield’s garden will be one of four open for self-guided tours on Sunday, June 12—day two of the “Landscape Pleasures” event. All of the gardens—John Barman’s and Kelly Graham’s in Sagaponack, Steven Gambrel’s in Sag Harbor, Tony Ingrao’s and Randy Kemper’s in East Hampton, and Mr. Sofield’s and Dennis Anderson’s in Southampton—are owned by interior designers, Mr. Guillot said.

“It’s a personal expression of that particular designer,” Mr. Guillot said. “You walk away seeing the garden and knowing the owner’s own passion for the personal garden and insights into what their own work is like.”

But Mr. Sofield pointed out that a garden is a job well done if there are no signs of human interference.

“No one should know I even existed,” he said. “I think design calls so much more attention to itself than someone’s presence. I always have the garden feel so in sync that you can’t imagine anything else having been there.”

Unlike Mr. Sofield, whose green thumbs tend to most of his garden, fellow symposium speaker Alexa Hampton has what she calls a “black thumb.”

“I think I’ll bring an interesting voice because I know nothing about planting,” she said during a telephone interview on Wednesday, June 1. “But I have to say that it does play a role in design. There are people who cannot plant and cannot devise a garden, but they know beautiful landscape and want to make sense of them in an interior capacity.”

An interior and exterior shouldn’t be divorced from one another, she explained, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they should match.

“When you’ve lived in an apartment building your entire life, you don’t want the exterior of the building to rule the interior,” she said. “You don’t want to use concrete as your life motif. You can speak to the exterior, amplify it, offset it, or bring it when it’s absent.”

Ms. Hampton said she happily leaves her Southampton home’s garden in the trusty, qualified hands of her landscapers. The pink, purple and blue flowers outside serve as an “antidote” to her chocolate living room, she said, complementing the dark brown walls and white trim.

“Sometimes you don’t want to steal the thunder of the outside, you don’t want to dilute it,” she said. “Say you have tons of hydrangeas outside, you don’t want tons of hydrangea prints on the inside. Don’t repeat it everywhere. It then goes from being the star singer to the chorus.”

While Ms. Hampton said she does not understand gardens, she does appreciate them.

“When you think about gardens, think about scale, much in the way you’d think about furniture,” she said. “Everything can’t be too little, and it can’t be too monumental and gargantuan. There needs to be an architectural understanding of things outside and inside.”

Mr. Sofield, who has been gardening his entire life, encourages taking chances and getting creative. Planting is an escape from reality and a perfect therapy, he explained.

“There’s only so crazy you can be if you have two hands in dirt,” he laughed. “My own garden, it’s extravagant and exuberant. It may not be something I’d live with all the time if it were my only place, but it’s nice to have fantasy in something that’s chaotic. In my everyday jobs, I’m creating such seamless perfection. I like the abandonment of it. I just think surround yourself by things that trigger your imagination and make you do different things and take you to unsafe places.”

The Parrish Art Museum will host “Landscape Pleasures” on Saturday, June 11, and Sunday, June 12. The symposium will be held at the museum on Saturday, June 11, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. On Sunday, June 12, the four gardens will be open for self-guided tours from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tickets for the symposium and garden tour are $200, or $150 for members. A benefit committee cocktail party for benefactors, sponsors and patrons will be held at the private residence “Redcraft” in Southampton on Saturday, June 11. Tickets range from $350 to $1,000 for the cocktail party, symposium and garden tour. For more information or to purchase tickets, call the special events office at 283-2118 ext. 42 or email specialevents@parrishart.org.