Sky-High Gardens
Green sanctuaries transform Chicago rooftops
With urban space at a premium, owners of single-family houses, townhouses, and condominiums are making the most of every inch. They’re transforming outdoor spaces for active living and using them to cook, grow vegetables and flowers, socialize, enjoy skyline views, and listen to birds chirp and water trickle. Carefully selected plantings complete the scene by creating privacy and screening unpleasant views.
There’s a collective benefit to the renewed interest in landscaping too. “It can make urban areas more livable by cooling them, slowing rainwater run-off, and improving storm-water management,” says Chicago landscape architect Douglas Hoerr, whose eponymous firm put a green roof atop the Michigan Avenue Apple Store.
Not everyone has a yard sizable enough to accommodate his or her outdoor lifestyle, however. Instead, many Chicagoans are taking it to the roof, creating urban oases atop dwellings and garages and on elevated terraces. They lavish the same attention on their outdoor décor as they do on their interior, creating a seamless continuation of their living space. Stylish sky-high rooms are as personal and practical as their indoor counterparts, as these three gardens illustrate.
Four-Level Rooftop
A new kitchen with a flat roof, built 4 feet above grade and linking a once-freestanding garage, inspired not one but four garden levels within a narrow city lot. Hoerr designed the gardens to have a contemporary edge compatible with the style of the home. “This is a garden where you can’t tell where the architect’s work left off and ours began,” Hoerr says.
Besides differentiating the garden “rooms” by level, Hoerr varied their functions and the hardscape that he used. The first garden lies at grade and can be accessed from the kitchen deck via curving steps. A bubbling fountain soothes the homeowners when they lounge or dine outside. Gravel provides a natural background to the continuous beds of shrubs and perennials. Trees and a custom slatted fence shield the garden from a neighbor’s property.
The second-level “kitchen” garden, paved in ipe, is furnished with a grill, table, and chairs, creating an outdoor breakfast room. A metal spiral staircase leads up to the third garden, also used for eating and entertaining, which is paved in ipe panels atop aluminum struts. A railing allows viewers to gaze down to the lower gardens, and a screen fabricated from outdoor-fabric panels attached to a lightweight pipe framework shades the area. The fourth-level garden, atop the kitchen addition and only 2 feet higher than the third garden, is paved in gravel and used to sunbathe and enjoy city views.
Hoerr unified the gardens with flowers and plants that cascade down from the level above or grow up from the level below. He also extended the scale of the home’s features into the garden by repeating the grid of kitchen windows in the fence’s proportions and mimicking the interior wood floor in the decking.
The homeowners relish the additional outdoor living space. “We can have breakfast at the table in summer or entertain when the weather is good,” says the wife, who loves to garden. Since the levels are covered on three sides, she enjoys the microclimate the new rooms create. Flowers bloom earlier than they used to, she says. “I don’t even have to empty my clay pots.”
Trio of Terraces
On three terraces surrounding a penthouse apartment in a David Adler Art Deco-era building, Hoerr designed three gardens that are very different, yet similar. Each garden suits the room it adjoins and features plant materials appropriate for the sunlight that terrace receives. Yet all are compatible with the building’s deco styling, aesthetically pleasing year-round, and use wall surfaces for vertical gardening so that floor space is left free. “If you create an underlying good landscape design, you can change the plantings as seasons, trends, or tastes change. You can dress them up or down and make them as layered and overflowing as you want,” Hoerr says.
He removed the terraces’ original brick paver floors and replaced them with black granite grid paving. To soften the building’s exterior, the firm designed two trellis frameworks hung with moss baskets of lush flowers. Drip irrigation systems hide in the trellises and in custom, ornamental-iron planter boxes that are embellished with deco scrollwork and lined with black-painted tin liners.
The terrace off the home’s formal living room, the largest, creates a green background for those sitting indoors and serves as a green foreground to the city. Because it faces northwest, plants such as ferns that thrive in the shade dominate. The sunny southwest-facing second terrace, off the dining room and kitchen, hosts a profusion of herbs and flowers. The third terrace, off a study, has glorious northeast views of Lake Michigan, but also looks out toward tall buildings, which Hoerr camouflaged with the trellises and baskets.
Eastern Inspiration
For an empty-nester couple who recently moved from a large suburban house with a sprawling yard into a new condominium overlooking Lake Michigan and Millennium Park, an outdoor room was a must. Landscape architect Bernard Jacobs of Jacobs/Ryan Associates, a Chicago landscape architecture firm, got the plumb assignment: transform the 28th-floor, 1,800-square-foot terrace into an Asian-inspired garden that would continue the indoor décor and handle big family get-togethers.
Because of the spacious outdoor area, Jacobs created a series of garden rooms, which he defined through different surfaces and enclosed on three sides with bamboo fencing and raised bamboo-clad planters.
Visitors step outside onto an ipe deck, which serves as an entry to the garden and dining area. Jacobs selected many of the garden materials for their symbolism. The washed black stones that edge the deck, for example, represent water. A path of blue-diamond stone features four stones inscribed with Chinese symbols that represent happiness, luck, health, and wealth. The blue-diamond slabs meander through two purple-gravel-stone gardens containing three “scholar stones,” so called because they represent a traditional Eastern Asian family with a father, mother, and child. The angled paths reflect the Chinese philosophy that visitors should not walk in a straight line through a garden, but meander to experience the individual spaces, Jacobs says.
At the far end of the terrace, a fountain and misting system create a sense of mystery, while a raised ipe deck provides a visual anchor and a shady place to relax. A Chinese-style gate of reclaimed old-growth cypress logs found in Louisiana, surrounded by eight columns—a lucky number in China—adds drama and shelters an eighteenth-century granite bench. Other Chinese touches: lanterns and wicker seating upholstered in red.
On many evenings, the homeowners lounging in this elegant space get an additional treat: music from concerts in the park below. Both designer and owners are delighted with the results. One of the owners characterizes the garden as “indescribably amazing.” And Jacobs? “This is the most unbelievable garden I’ve seen—and done,” he says. “You turn on the misting system, listen to music from Millennium Park, and you’re blown away.” MH
