“It feels to me like a cathedral,” says Rakolta, who plans to put a long harvest table in that serene space. The most dramatic of these is defined by an allée of eight towering date palms, which create a long view to the water from the house's front entrance. The irregularly shaped spaces around the sprawling house were organized as a series of outdoor rooms, each with a strong character of its own. “You get views to the water without it being shown completely, while the eye tends to skip over the buildings across the way,” says Sanchez. “Everyone fought me on it, saying, ‘You paid so much for the water view, why hide it?’ Only Jorge said, ‘Good idea.’” The sculpted hedge, comprising Ficus retusa (Cuban laurel) formed into arches, runs about one-third the length of the property's 200-foot waterfront, between the lawn and a newly built sea wall, and also encloses the swimming pool on two sides. She proposed a similar approach to taming the too-open view of the waterway. On a trip to Italy's Lake Como, Rakolta had noticed hedges with arches cut out of them. The homeowner also likes to set tables on the lawn. “Boats would anchor and look in at us,” she says, a problem since the early days, when the new house was surrounded by a “moonscape,” with not a single tree.Ĭlad in bougainvillea, a pergola tops the dining loggia. Rakolta and her husband, John, who use the property as a winter getaway (they also have homes in New York, Harbor Springs and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and are building a home in Aspen), often joined by their four children and four-soon to be five-grandchildren, also wanted more privacy. “The view could have been either beautiful or common, depending on how it was handled,” says Sanchez. The house faces the Lake Worth lagoon, which is lovely, but the buildings on the opposite bank less so. The most difficult challenge was the water view. “We left the swimming pool and a little terrace, but that's about it.” “We removed all of the walkways and some of the plants,” says Sanchez. The eventual result was an extensive redo of hardscaping and plantings. A few years ago, she contacted principals Jorge Sanchez and Phil Maddux, her head filled with images of northern Italy's lake district. Some initial landscaping had been done in the mid-1990s, when the house was built, but Rakolta was never completely satisfied with it. The distinctive arched hedges hug the sides of the swimming pool, rendering it private and a bit mysterious.
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