When your house is set along the coastline in Florida, certain precautions quite literally come with the territory. This homeowner’s vacation home on coral reef–fringed Islamorada in the Florida Keys, for example, is lofted high above the surf on sturdy columns. “In The Keys, the houses are raised up because of the storms that come through,” says Key West–based landscape architect Craig Reynolds. “This house was raised up, but underneath was just a mishmash of different columns with different size posts.” When Reynolds first began working on the renovation, they opted to limit the columns to two specific sizes—larger ones that are sixteen inches square sheathed with coral, and a smaller version veneered with wood. “For the bigger [columns], stone masons clad them with coral stone over cement board by James Hardie. Then all the other columns were wood four-by-fours that we had a clad to be six-by-sixes, and put skirts and capitals on them so they would look clean and simple.”
The results created a still functional—yet more honed—backdrop for the exultant gardens that Reynolds and his crew created. But when the architect first got his hands on the plot, “the whole front yard was just sand, basically—there was no pool or anything,” says Reynolds. One of the first things he did was assure the homeowner that he didn’t need his entire front yard to be a parking lot. “When he comes down, he parks his car and rides his bike everywhere, so we said ‘Let’s put the car off to the side,’” Reynolds recalls. Freeing up the land allowed more space for what would become an outdoor living room complete with a social pool for lounging with friends and family, a recreational pool, and a hot tub.
It all feels very much like a Vacationland now, thanks in part to one choice that had a major impact: a new exterior color palette, which did much to give the functional an air of fabulosity. “The color palette is from Jamaica, and the design of the house was meant to be sort of Balinese because most of it is open-air living,” says Reynolds. To that end, the architect installed an outdoor kitchen, outdoor dining, and outdoor showers with slats for privacy.
Palms now abound, which the homeowner loves. “Alex Thommes, my senior landscape architect, is a Palm-ifile,” says Reynolds. “Those two got together and tried to get as many interesting palm species as they could in the garden, with many upper, middle, and lower story [sizes]. When you layer them like that, you can get a lot of palms in without it feeling overcrowded.” Amid the twenty-five species of palms they installed on the property—which is less than an acre in size—are several well-established trees. To successfully plant mature trees like those, Reynolds has some advice: “You either get a plant that’s in the ground— they call it ‘field grown,’ or you get one that has been grown in a pot for fifteen or twenty years in nurseries. If it’s in the field, it goes through a shock phase before it starts to look good. We always try to get one in a pot, because the roots are kind of hardened, and when they go in the ground, they thrive fast.” Call it a key to great trees.
