Residential Gardens

North Salem Residence

North Salem, NY • Ongoing since 1997

Designers

Oehme, van Sweden & Associates
Wolfgang Oehme
James van Sweden

The design of this 25-acre property located 40 miles northeast of New York City is carefully orchestrated to selectively focus and conceal/reveal views. The firm collaborated with architects Elizabeth Demetriades and Patrick Walker to site the house, and deployed locally quarried stone and dense plantings of grasses, perennials, and specimen trees and shrubs, to connect the modern house with its rural, upstate setting. Flowering dogwood trees, tall grasses, and perennials conceal hard edges and overlap stepping stone pathways extending into the landscape.

 

The planting throughout was romantic and informal, an idealized version of the natural fields and woods that stretched out in every direction.[1]

James van Sweden

 

Learn More

Architecture and the Garden and The Artful Garden. see resources

 

[1] fJames van Sweden and Tom Christopher, The Artful Garden: Creative Inspiration for Landscape Design (New York: Random House, 2011), 174.

 

Exhibition

 

The Photographers

Frederick Charles (American, b. 1957)
Charles is a New York-based architectural photographer. His work has been included in Landscape Architecture, TIME, Dwell, and LIFE magazines, among other publications. Charles has documented award-winning New York historic preservation projects such as the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum and the New York Botanical Garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.