Thornton Ladd first saw his hilltop site, it was a stark plateau which had been carved by a steam shovel in the 1920s. Confronting him, too, were the crumbling remains of an unfinished Georgian mansion. "The first constructive task I undertook," says Ladd, "was the re-sculpturing of the hill. By creating various levels for gardens and terraces, the aesthetic dullness of the flat ground was eliminated. The necessity for moving great amounts of soil was minimized by introducing on each succeeding level the kinds of native plants that would grow with no attention and very little water on the decomposed granite of the site." To a great extent, the plan for the house was influenced by Ladd's concept of the entire property-both the outdoors and indoors-as an architectural entity.
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This is immediately apparent as one approaches the house. The road winds upward past a skeletal concrete cube, which is visually tied to the uppermost level by a long horizontal trellis, and ends in a large parking area adjacent to an outdoor gallery and the swimming pool. The gallery connects the pool area with the peristyle, at which point one covered walk leads to the entrance and another to a bedroom-bath wholly separate from main part of the house. On one side of the living room is the master bedroom, with a view of the water garden. A storage wall for books and hi-fi divides the living and dining rooms, both of which overlook formal gardens. An ingenious pattern of horizontal vine-covered trellises, called the "hanging garden," extends beyond the crest of the hill on the north side of the living room.
Hilltop has a sand garden, a water garden, a Mondrian garden and a peristyle. There are two good reasons for this elaborate plan. The gardens distract attention from overpowering vistas, and they are structural landscape devices on a site without fertile soil. Through the intricate arrangement of levels, walls, grilles and covered walks, the garden areas become individual outdoor "rooms." Each has its own character but contributes to the architectural harmony. The water garden, which lies between the two bedrooms, the Mondrian garden and the sand garden all are linked by walks to the quadrangular peristyle facing the living room. The geometry of the gardens incorporates many lines of the old building which stood on the site, and here and there an old concrete wall shows itself as a part of the new garden structure. Rafters and grilles were planned to cast constantly changing patterns of light and shadow in the gardens.
Living room sunshades, which unroll from ceiling recesses, are electrically operated from panel of switches.
source: House and Garden Magazine | April 1957
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