House Magazine - Long Island's premier design architecture & lifestyle magazine

Rolling stones

Long Island has a quintessential landscape look ­– trees, shrubs, flowers and manicured lawns. Designer Lee Najman was asked to design a landscape for this modern house on the water on the North Shore that would present an entirely different style and feeling.

He suggested a landscape that would reflect a desert, mountainous slopes, a southwest natural setting. His vision was to design a landscape that looked as if the house was built into a mountain slide of huge boulders being deposited in a natural way ending up in a walkway that would be inlayed into the driveway. It is as if the landscape was here, and the house and driveways were built around it all.

Najman's approach minimizes plantings and brings in very large boulders. Small boulders would not do. Huge, boulders, some ten feet tall, of varying textures, color and shapes was called for. This is not easily found in the east coast, as the local boulders and stones are usually grey Westchester material. Finding material is one thing. Delivering and installing 100,000 pounds of boulders was a real challenge. The boulders had to be stacked up against the house and set up to cascade downward on the entry platforms, and continue into the driveway. The walkway across the driveway was a special problem.

After finding enough large, interesting, relatively flat stones, on the average six to seven feet long, they were inlayed into the surface and surrounded by smaller ashlars stones to give the impression of a real flowing effect.

Sparse plantings, a lone monkey tree and small amount of turf were used. Concealed lighting produce an effect that is dramatic daily and remarkable in the evening.

The clients, skeptical at first, quickly got onto the design band wagon, and are extremely pleased with the results. "We did not see it initially, but as it was coming together it blew our minds."