(cheerful music) - I am Edmund Hollander, the landscape architect.

Today we're gonna be looking at Topping Farm on the east end of Long Island and having a discussion with our collaborator, the architect, Peter Pennoyer.

(cheerful music continues) Hello, Peter.

- Hi, Ed.

Good to see you.

- Welcome back to Topping Farm.

- Thank you.

- It's been a couple of years since you've been here?

- Yeah.

It's terrific.

- And the trees have grown.

- They sure have.

Wow.

- Yeah.

(cheerful music) You remember what this place looked like when we first walked through here?

- It was an old East End farm, a little bit dilapidated, a potato barn without the potatoes.

- Right.

Wasn't that one of the oldest farm houses on Long Island?

- Yes, yes.

I mean, really one of the oldest structures in Suffolk County.

- Wow.

- A small farmhouse still here.

- You know, I'm thinking back about our process of how we did this, and I guess we really started with master planning between your office and my office, collaborating on where were the roads gonna go and the buildings and everything else.

- Right, and how you would experience it, how the house would unfold, like the landscape unfolds, and how we would create something that wasn't simply sort of showing the whole thing the moment you come in.

- Right, right, I mean, having these great trees here, this great old catalpa and the beech trees, and then the new trees we planted in here, you know, kind of invite you into the property.

You don't quite know what you're gonna find.

And, you know, things are discreetly tucked away, but it's almost like a choreography that we develop together that invites you in and then you discover the house, and then you come through the house and it's really a discovery of wonderful places.

- Right, right.

It's an extraordinary process.

And the master planning stage is when your mind is most open for any possibilities.

- Right.

- It's when you're sketching together and thinking together and challenging each other.

- Right.

- It's really a pleasure.

- You know, I think you really did a great job the way you kind of set that house into those trees and let the architecture kind of unfold into the landscape.

- I think the hardest thing is siting a house and you do this so well with the trees to make the house feel like it is in the inevitable place, not just one of four places, but it just has to be there.

(cheerful music continues) (gentle upbeat music) So the challenge here was that the house is shallow, so it's one room deep, which is terrific for getting light through, but it also means that you have long facades.

So our approach here is to have gables coming off the main gable, but you don't want it symmetrical.

You don't want it formality in the architecture.

So I think perhaps the difficulty here might've been for you, is that we have symmetry about this one gable, but then it becomes less formal.

- I love the way the house sits in the landscape though, and I think, you know, one of the things we did so successfully here is the front door doesn't yell, here's the front door, and the landscape invites you to the front door.

There's a choreography to this.

Even these great slabs of old reclaimed yorkstone set in the gravel that lead you to your front door.

I love the way the kitchen windows in the house look out at the vegetable gardens and the orchards.

It just seems to tie the inside and the outside together so well.

- Well, every place relates to the views that you have from each room.

So they are room-specific and wing-specific.

- Right.

I think the way our landscape and architecture play with each other and relate to each other is what makes us such a successful home.

- Thank you.

- Looks pretty nice, doesn't it?

- Absolutely.

(cheerful music) So, Ed, as you remember, the challenge here was that this is where all the views are.

We're facing the pond, this extraordinary lawn you created and this end of the house, which is, I'd say the more formalized architecture has the double gable, the massive chimneys and the porch from the living room.

But where things really get interesting is in the sort of lower slung, asymmetrical wing here, where the hinge between the two wings is this dining room bay that comes out and it has a plinth.

And what I'm really happy about is the way the plinth, which then supports our screen porch and the open cover terrace then gives sort of the base for everything you created.

- I mean, the end of this house is really the ultimate expression of the collaboration between your office, my office, Victoria Hagen and her team, because we've got covered screen porches, covered porches, open terraces.

There are a series of living spaces for the family, which they use all the time that work in any kind of weather.

And it allows you to be as much in the garden as you want to be.

And, you know, the way we've taken the stone detail from the base of the house and it wraps around and becomes the stairs.

But the other thing was, you know, siting the house with you in a way where we preserve the trees, which sets one grade all the way across.

And this was anything but a flat piece of land.

- And, you know, I can't recall, which may be a good thing about your skills, whether you brought the- - Many people can't remember our skills, so it's understandable.

- But did you bring the grade up?

Because it does seem like the house sits more comfortably and lower in the land than many.

- I think there was a lot of work that we did between the offices getting, you know, the elevation of this, which was clearly tied into that, of that tree right there.

I'm sure that tree set the house.

And then, you know, what we had to do to roll and grade this land up so that the stairs just flowed down onto here.

It invited you down here.

But I really think you can see the way we worked together to create these spaces because they're neither architecture nor landscape.

They're kind of the best of both worlds.

- Right, right.

And I love the way the hydrangea screen from the south and then we constantly refer to the sort of the anchor tree of the whole property, the other end of the house.

- [Ed] Right.

- So it completes the story.

- Right, and the trees, the house nestles in amongst them.

And whether they were God's trees or our trees, I guess one day they'll all be God's trees.

But, you know, trees are always planted not just for this generation, but the next generation.

And as these grow, they will do for this house, when the kids are the parents here, these trees will be those trees.

- [Peter] Yeah.

(cheerful music) - Peter, I really love the way our work combined here where we've got this incredibly charming tennis pavilion that is just slathered in white wisteria on Memorial Day and wonderful and fragrant.

And the way this connection, this allée of crape myrtles leads us down to that farmhouse the way it was relocated in the way you put it back together.

And it just feels almost inevitable the way this walkway where the gardens change through the seasons and the crape myrtles invite us down and there's a little grove of sweet bay magnolias with the Adirondack chairs.

But the Adirondack chairs seem cozy because of the way they sit in front of your building and the way your building creates a home for them.

- Right, and I think it's interesting the way you align the path with those little, they're very small windows.

They're very old.

- They're even older than me.

(both chuckling) - And it actually creates a place there which is quite intimate.

In fact, the path is very intimate because we've looked at this wide open expanse in front of the main house, and now we're having something that's a totally different feeling - If we're thinking about sun and shade and fragrance and texture and color, sound, again, you know, as you're moving through, you almost you can feel yourself being drawn down to the way the architecture is welcoming you through here.

And I think, you know, as we've done so many times before, the architecture and the landscape are both better because the way they compliment each other.

- Yeah.

And I happen to love the kind of laciness of the crape myrtle and the way that plays off against the linearity of the shingles.

- And down in June when you're sitting there, those sweet bay magnolias are in flower and it's wonderfully fragrant, and just it's another kind of magical place.

And the walls of the architecture compliment the landscape that comes to it.

So it really, the room is made of both built architecture and living architecture.

- Yes, yes.

Absolutely.

And I'll hang out there anytime with you for some mint juleps.

- Well, I was thinking gin and tonics, but- - Okay.

- We can go mint juleps.

(Peter laughing) (cheerful music continues) So, Peter, I'm not sure when the last time was you made it out to the working part of the farm, if you will.

- Yeah, it's flourished.

It's absolutely flourished.

But I mean, this is a bit of an homage to the farm that was here and the post agricultural landscape that we inherited with the great soils.

And, you know, it's wonderful to have cutting gardens and vegetable gardens and Belgian fences.

We have orchards with peaches and pears and apples.

It's, you know, surrounded by pollinator meadow.

And to some extent, this is still an extension of your architecture because the forms that we see here, the materials, the detailing, it feeds off the Shingle Style architecture and feeds off the forms that you developed in the house.

And even, you know, as we go out in the meadow, you'll see how your kitchen windows look out across this meadow out to the vegetable gardens.

And there's, you know, that wonderful thing where you go from vegetable garden past the chicken coop to get eggs into the kitchen, and you've created a magical life for a family.

- Yeah, no, it's a wonderful thing.

But I have to say, Ed, it looks more like you were doing architecture because I'm seeing a series of rooms, I'm seeing the rooms with the espalier.

Then I'm seeing the room with the cutting gardens.

So maybe I'm seeing it as architecture.

- Well, and you're seeing it that's why we work so well together because the architecture and the landscape really are one.

- Right.

And I love the way the boxwoods reappear now as these sculptural objects plunked down in such a, I don't know, whimsical way.

- Well, except, you know, we have arbors and arches and the Belgian fence with the pears, and there is structure to this.

- It seems wild, but there is structure and it all comes out of the structure that we created for the entire property.

- Right.

And it's again, the contrast of the formality of geometry and then these wonderful sweeping borders.

It's extraordinary.

- [Ed] That look incredibly easy to do and were probably the single most difficult element of the entire landscape to get well.

- [Peter] I know enough about gardening to...

I can't imagine.

It's really extraordinary.

- Everyone assumes meadows, it's Julie Andrews sprinkling wildflowers in a can and singing as she runs through the place, and it's taken us years to get the meadows established.

It is the epitome of summer though, when you're out here.

I mean, these big super drifts of different types of Rudbeckia are really kind of wonderful out here.

And when you come through here, you then realize that, you know, this all lines up with the gables of your house and the kitchen, and you kind of look from the kitchen out to the orchard.

You can see from the kitchen table when the peaches are ripe.

- Right.

But this is really the moment when you realize the connection all the way through the site in your master plan, basically.

- The allée that goes to the old house is over here.

- [Peter] Yes.

- And, you know, the circular form of the meadows, you know, it kind of creates a loving embrace.

- [Peter] Absolutely responding to the house.

- On the perfect day when you're in the kitchen, you can see the terraces and the kids on the screen porch and the lawn and the pond.

And then this side, it's sweeps of meadow and great flowers and peaches and apples.

It's got vegetables and cutting flowers.

So it's the epitome of wonderful living in the country.

And I think it's because of the work that we did together.

And I hope you're pleased with the way this has grown in over these years.

- You've done such a beautiful thing here, Ed, and it really makes the house what it should be.

It just is such a joy to see what has grown.

What has matured.

And honestly, there's some trees that I thought were original that apparently you planted.

So that's a good thing.

- We're a good team.

- Yeah.

(cheerful music continues) (cheerful music continues)