June 27, 2014
I am so thrilled my urban garden was featured in the May 2014 issue of House & Home, and now it will be featured at H&H Online TV this August!
Look for my featured urban garden at H&H Online TV this August!
This article in House and Home magazine got me thinking about the elements in my garden, and how they all came together to create the feel of the European courtyards from my travels. However, the piece that I consider the heart of the garden is the urn that we converted into a water feature.
I was looking through Bess Hillery Crawford’s book entitled “Rosedale” published in 2000, and found an image of our urn on a front lawn in Chestnut Park in 1915. I had been eyeing this urn for a while – it languished in the back garden of an antique store in Toronto for several years – and I knew that it would be the perfect centerpiece. Many tried to talk me out of it because of its size, weight and age. However, I stuck with my intuition, knowing that the final outcome would be well worth it. To my delight, six months later, the urn was ours.
From Bess Hillery Crawford's 2000 book "Rosedale", our urn sits on a front lawn in Chestnut Park circa 1915.
We converted it into a central fountain, and needed lots of manpower to turn the 600lb urn upright. Our movers described the process as moving “an elephant on top of a dime” because of the incredible weight of the piece. Prayers were said as the urn was moved, as we knew that there was only one try to get it right. From the image below, it is clear that it all worked out. We are thrilled at how this stunning water feature brings new life into our courtyard garden, and we have a great story from this transformation as well. For me, interior design is about the process of developing a space as we move toward the final planned result. It is during these processes that stories like this emerge, stories which inform and make our surroundings meaningful.
An image of our finished urn water feature, as photographed by Donna Griffith in the May 2014 House and Home article, "A Creative Retreat".