Playful Retreat
Color, Stone, and Quiet Joy · Aspen, Colorado
A home on an Aspen hillside, made for daily life and quiet use.
This is a garden in three parts. The stonework of the architecture sets the scale. A soft alpine palette of hostas, sedum, ornamental grasses, and mountain perennials softens the grade. And a few deliberate notes of color, bee balm pink and a pair of bright blue chairs, keep the garden from taking itself too seriously.
It was designed for an active family that likes its fun outdoors. Lawn games and the urge to wander drove the plan, so the hillside's big grade change became an asset: a series of garden rooms stacked up the slope, with paths that meander between them and keep going, out the top of the property toward the ski area beyond.
The site rises in layers. Stone steps thread up from the lower patio, past pockets of hostas and creeping groundcover, toward an upper terrace shaded by aspen and blue spruce. Boulders set deep into the hillside hold the grade and frame each planting bed, and the lichen and moss show they have been there a while.
Water shows up three times, tuned for quiet rather than show and set where the rooms of the house look out on it. At the foot of the property, a small pond catches reflections from the wood-clad home above. Even the two window wells were rebuilt as small sunken gardens, with retaining and natural egress, so the lowest level of the house gets a view worth keeping.
The main patio, the master patio, the hot tub, and the fire pit were all carved out of the same canvas. A new outdoor shower adds one more layer beside the hot tub, the kind of small discovery this garden likes to hide. Bee balm and gaillardia hold the edge between lawn and patio. Hens-and-chicks tuck themselves into the gravelly margins, settling in for the long Colorado winters.
The result is not a polite, museum-quiet garden. It knows when to whisper and when to lean into a little joy.
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Escape Garden Design · 312-E Aspen Business Center, Aspen, Colorado 81611 · Voice: 970.920.3700 · Fax: 970.920.9589 · Start a conversation