Our challenge was to warm up the front of the home without detracting from the star of the show—the façade.
Our clients in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago are the fortunate owners of a stunning new home which combines the best of the new and the classic. The home’s façade features a modern take on key elements of the Classical style of architecture – tall windows, minimal accents and ornamentation, and clean limestone construction. (The more modern interior features the most up-to-date design elements available.)
But our clients love plants, and our challenge was to warm up the front of the home without detracting from the star of the show – the façade. We decided to ground the home with a formal front garden of boxwood, bluestone and fastigiate hornbeam trees. The lower-level window boxes were treated to a subtle mix of rubber plants and draping lysimachia, with micro-irrigation employed to keep them looking their best. But irrigation lines on the upper two level of window boxes was out of the question. Dripping water can stain limestone, and routine maintenance would involve working from the interior of the home or using tall extension ladders – neither ideal.
Our solution? Faux boxwoods shrubs with custom concrete bases designed to fit the narrow window containers and keep the shrubs in place and secure from the wind. These high-quality faux boxwoods look so realistic that from street level they can’t be distinguished from the real thing. They offer the perfect solution to a difficult design challenge.
The result is a timeless façade with a new twist – and satisfied clients!