Sunset Ideas, Tips & Guides

There’s nothing like a tall,green hedge to create a little real estate intrigue, and the best neighborhoods in Santa Barbara are lined with them. The coastal California community is known as one of the country’s favorite beachside retreats, and for its many homes that look as though they were plucked straight from a storybook—if you’re lucky enough to catch a glimpse through thick green foliage.

There’s an ugly truth behind those beautiful alstroemeria, dahlias, and roses we adore—80 percent of them are grown overseas and imported on gas-guzzling jets—often soaked in pesticides—despite the fact that they can be grown right here in the U.S. These blooms are often called “fresh” cut flowers, but they’re anything but. 

Every kitchen needs good storage, but not every kitchen has good storage. Some are small and need a lot of hacks to find a spot for everything. Some can be the right size but with not enough cabinet or drawer space. And others are just not using their storage potential fully, like this kitchen in San Rafael, California.

When it comes to designing your home, indoor spaces like the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms tend to take first priority. But that doesn’t mean your outdoor spaces should be overlooked. Any outdoor space, whether you’re lucky enough to have a large backyard, pool deck, front porch, or even a small balcony, can serve as a natural extension of your interior design and add to the overall style of your home.

Just because our attention is focused on keeping things steady (ahem, alive) in the garden this deep into the summer, it doesn’t mean we should neglect our leafy loved ones who live indoors—especially if you have travel plans! Houseplants have special needs every season, but summer heat and time away come with their own set of challenges. 

While a family of five (a couple and three daughters) had made some renovations throughout the years to their 1949 mid-century, post-war house in Seattle since they moved in in 2013, there was one room that still desperately needed a facelift: their galley-style kitchen. “It was hardly big enough for two people to move about, let alone a family of five!” says Meghan Price of Maple & Plum, who oversaw the project. “There were areas of wasted space, major lack of storage, and it felt dark and uninviting. The back door and laundry were situated just off the galley kitchen, with tight, limited access to the backyard.”

Interior designer Stephanie Hunt’s seven-bedroom, 10-bathroom Park City, Utah, home is a grown-up, glammed-up, sophisticated version of a funhouse—it’s got so many surprises and delights at every turn. And believe it or not, she got the inspiration for the home on a freezing winter trip to Reykjavík, Iceland. “We were there for a quick weekend trip and I was struck by how the simple barn structures—very close together—looked like one unit. Because we’re art collectors I wondered what it would feel like to have each pod or pavilion, if you will, developed in a simple, honest architectural style, connected by halls and glass elements, with the halls serving sort of in-home art galleries,” she explains.

Tucked away in a historic section of Palm Springs is the Pop Pad, a three-bedroom, three-bath home. The owners were initially drawn to the area and the history behind the mid-century modern house. Designed and built by the iconic Palm Springs builder/architect duo of Alexander and Krisel in the late 1950s, the unique real estate opportunity had lots of potential but needed a major update.

After 20 years of having a lawn that took, I wanted a yard that contributed: to the planet, to local animals, to biodiversity, to my neighbors, to my mental health. With the sage (native plant pun intended) design work, counsel, and collaboration of David Godshall of Terremoto and David Newsom of Wild Yards Project—and a plant-friendly paint palette from color consultant Teresa Grow—another little garden that gives was born.

Ah, garden dreams. We all have them. You drive by someone’s front yard and gasp at how original, yet welcoming it is. Or you go to a friend’s garden party and get positively green with envy over their, well, greenery and the overall flow of the space. To achieve such greatness, you decide you need to hire a landscape designer. And then you realize you have no idea what to do next. 

It may feel like a cliché to say that kitchens are the heart of the home, but there’s an undeniable truth to that statement. Kitchens are where we gather with friends and family and where we whip up delicious meals and refreshing drinks—they’re a central location around which our home lives revolve. 

When it comes to garden gear, there is a clear divide among growers: Those who love tomato cages, and those who consider them an absolute useless eyesore. I’m controversially the latter. Aesthetics aside, there are a lot of questions I have about the invention of this particular metal torture device, and I have opinions about how it might not be the best way to grow your tomatoes. In fact, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with your crops due to cage structure—increased pests and lower fruit production to start! 

The growing season might be in full swing, but there are still ways to upgrade your garden game. From keeping out unwanted pests (or pets) to building your own customized trellising and irrigation—it’s time to make your beds work smarter, not harder. We’ve got five ways to customize your planters this summer that will not only make things look fantastic, but will take your growing capabilities to the next level. Whether you choose to tackle them all or just add one to your list of weekend to-dos, I promise it will be a noticeable refresh with rewarding results. 

If you’ve ever dreamt of a perfectly coordinated house and garden, you’re in the right place. You can actually plant the right color roses, flowers, and more foliage so that it matches your house just so. It’s all about planning, and this excerpt from The Color of Roses by Danielle Dall’Armi Hahn (Ten Speed Press, $35) will take out the guesswork. Follow these steps if you want to up your curb appeal and make your house the best looking one on the block.

With TikTok continuing to rise in popularity, and short-form video becoming the end-all, be-all of information sharing, it seems like our attention spans are getting shorter and trends are coming and going faster than ever before. 

Have you ever heard that planting a small garden is like writing a short story instead of a novel? Well, I hadn’t either—until Los Angeles designer Adam Sirak said it—and I think it’s brilliant. “Some people might think they can’t have an amazing garden or that it’s not worth the trouble because they don’t have a big space,” Sirak says. “But a small space only means you have to take all your ideas and distill them down to a concentrated big idea.” He adds that, as with a short story, there’s no room for filler, and each choice must be thought of in relationship to the whole. “In this way, a small space can be a very exciting puzzle to put together,” he says.  

For those who are looking to buy a home for the first time, the feat can seem like quite the hurdle. With housing prices and interest rates still high, and a competitive market, it’s tough out there! And the number of first-time home buyers are dropping, too, because of those high prices—according to personal finance site WalletHub, 26% off home purchases were made by first-time home buyers in 2022, down from 34% the previous year.

It’s well known that the housing market is so competitive right now, but prospective home buyers aren’t the only ones hurting—renters are, too. According to personal finance website WalletHub, inflation has impacted rental prices, and 2022 saw the second-highest price growth in decades with a 6.2% year-over-year increase. 

Growing up in Hawai‘i, Meleana Estes was immersed in the traditions of lei making, thanks to her tūtū, or grandmother, a seamstress and costume designer who took up lei making in the 1960s, when traditional Hawai‘ian skills were re-emerging throughout the islands. Her tutu became an expert over the years and passed this knowledge to her family and to Meleana, who, after a career in fashion, went on to become an expert lei maker and teacher of the craft, running workshops first in Honolulu and eventually abroad. 

The ‘80s film Back to the Future (and its subsequent sequels) are total classics, and while fans will most definitely remember the comedic one-liners, storylines, and iconic characters, there are also some noteworthy architecture and design moments. Doc Brown’s home in the film is the Gamble House in Pasadena, California, a stunning, historic example of the Arts and Crafts movement designed by influential 20th century architects Charles and Henry Greene. Movie fans still flock to the location to take photos and go on tours.

What if you could paint your walls the same color as your car? Porsche has teamed up with paint brand Backdrop to let you do just that. In honor of the 75th anniversary of Porsche, the collaboration features four heritage colors that you can paint your house with: Irish Green, Riviera Blue, Speed Yellow, and Ruby Star.

If you’re in talks to potentially sell your home, Zillow is here with another tip for future sellers: Go dark. By that, they mean opt for moodier colors in every room—especially dark gray.

When Saffron + Poe shop owners and designers Fiona Bronte Burr and Johanna Vente Anderson saw the tiny 330-square-foot patio their new clients wanted to use for hot tubbing, entertaining, grilling, and more, they looked at it not as an impossibility, but as an opportunity.  

When Rashana Zaklit, the Hospitality Studio director at Gensler, a global architecture firm, looked at her Oakland courtyard, she had a vision: “Having an outdoor area for movie nights has always been a dream of mine from the moment we bought the house,” she says, adding that she imagined a space that took its design and planting cues from chic hotels in places like Napa Valley. 

When my wifeand I finally got around to re-landscaping our 1922 Spanish-style bungalow in Los Angeles, we did what many space-challenged Angelenos do: reimagined the unused back half of our driveway. It’s a classic SoCal bungalow move. Why park in your driveway when you can play in it? Over the years, it has served our family well, as a toy and tricycle repository when the kids were little, an outdoor weight room when the kids were bigger, and a spot for random acts of improvisational wood-fired cooking. Occasionally, we would even park a car in it. But with the kids grown and the functional-if-a-bit-meh swath of concrete not getting much use, we wanted the driveway to become a multipurpose space where we could garden, grill, dine, and just hang out. 

New home brands seem to debut every year, but it’s not every day that a beloved, legendary retailer launches something completely new. And that’s what Williams-Sonoma, Inc. (whose family of brands include West Elm and Pottery Barn) is doing. Introducing GreenRow, a home brand that is squarely focused on sustainability.

I love the way Francesca Grace stages a house. I love it because every room doesn’t look the same. I love it because her homes are filled with good ideas. And I really love it because she takes home staging, which is the epitome of sameness, and does the opposite.  

While it’s impossible to live inside Disneyland, we just found the next best thing for mega Disney fans. Walt Disney’s Storybook Mansion in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles is now available to rent for a cool $40,000 a month. Disney lived in the home from 1932 to 1950 with his wife and two daughters.

Part of a garden editor’s job is to always be on the lookout for new garden trends, and when not one, but four friends tell me they’re putting in bocce ball, my meter goes bing! “I love my bocce ball court,” says Julian Cautherley, a documentary film producer in Los Angeles (who also happens to be my daughter’s dad). “I put it in last fall, and it’s become the social center of my garden. Guests are just drawn to it—and it wasn’t expensive to put in, either.” 

When I first installed raised beds in my garden, I often felt like a dolt and mistakes were thick on the ground. I’d neglect adding compost and then not understand why my raspberries weren’t thriving, for example. Or I’d forget to turn off my timer on a rainy day and kick myself for wasting water. I also assumed certain things that just weren’t true—like I couldn’t plant any summer vegetables after spring.  

This article is part of our new 8-week, limited edition newsletter series, The Low-Water Gardening Guide, where we’ll walk you through what it takes to create a sustainable garden, from swapping in the appropriate plants to new irrigation methods to the tools you’ll need and more. Sign up here to get each installment straight to your inbox.

When we talk about native plants, we’re often referring to landscaping, but what about growing your own edible native plant garden? Native plants have adapted to where you live, after all, and unlike, say, your usual tomatoes and strawberries, native edibles have new flavors and scents to try. Meanwhile, planting edible native plants helps to forge a connection between the way we live now, and the way communities in the West have existed for thousands of years. “Just growing these plants is a way to tap into the continuum of time,” says Evan Meyer, the executive director of the Theodore Payne Foundation. “By growing edible plants, your garden can become a much more meaningful place.”   

It happens all the time. Someone gives you a Trader Joe’s orchid—or you buy one for yourself—and you love it. The hearty blooms on your Phalaenopsis or Dendrobiums look like moths or butterflies in flight, and they last for weeks. (Or maybe you love your orchid because it’s the flower of the year?)

When Stephanie Waddell, founder of Colorado-based Istoria Interior Design, moved from Chicago to Boulder with her husband, Greg, and her young son, Ames, she was looking for the kind of mountain-adjacent life that makes people fall in love with the West. She wanted a home with room for her family to grow, with great views of the surrounding landscape, a layout designed for entertaining friends in the close-knit community, and the expansive feeling of open space that fosters a connection with nature. They found a 1970s-era modern house on a double lot in a great neighborhood, with a Japanese-influenced garden that had been written up in the local press when it was first designed. 

The day I meet David Godshall, one of the founding members of the progressive landscape architecture firm known as Terremoto, I climb the concrete steps outside his home in East Los Angeles, open a worn hinged gate, and see his garden for the first time. What I find is not quite what I was expecting, yet it makes perfect sense. Rather than the composed plants and austere rigor of the poolside landscaping Terremoto designed for actor Mandy Moore, for example, Godshall’s own garden is a tangle of mostly native and low-water plants, placed in a way that seemed haphazard but that the plants seemed to love. A dirt path is surrounded by bursts of unruly pitcher sage, sprawling California buckwheat, and Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’, all flourishing under the canopy of a Western sycamore. Cross-sawn timber planks from fallen local trees that otherwise would’ve been pulped weave through the yard like mini-bridges for his kids to play on. Raised beds tumble down the slope. A fashionable composter (yes, there is such a thing) sits under the eaves of a house that’s been painted black. Meanwhile, in one corner, a clawfoot cast- iron bathtub sits on a humble wood-plank base. This, I find out later, is where Godshall likes to bathe. 

When I think of a plant hunter—as in, someone who goes to places like South Africa, Vietnam, China, and Nepal to find rare species and bring them back to the United States—I imagine a swashbuckling Indiana Jones type running through the mountains complete with hat and whip. And to hear famed plant collector, horticulturist, and botanist Daniel Hinkley tell it, there is a bit of daredevilry to the job. “I’ve had hard treks, bad knees, bee stings, and leeches hanging from my neck,” he says. “But if I am lucky, plant collecting offers me a bit of seed, and the resulting plant possesses all of the memories associated with it.”