Tour a Heavenly Garden Escape Outside LA

Readers of a certain age may remember a delightfully camp 1980s television commercial in which Jane Seymour breathlessly extolled the virtues of the perfume Le Jardin de Max Factor: “They say romance is back in style. I say it never went out. Le Jardin says it, too. It says it subtly. It says it softly,” the actress purred. “Because if you want romance to come on strong, you have to come on soft,” she concluded in a hazy blaze of flowers and hair. Designer Todd Nickey of the AD100 firm Nickey Kehoe knows all about romance. His own Pasadena jardin is a master class in harnessing unaffected natural beauty—softly, subtly—amid the wonders of the Southern California landscape. The verdant spread provides an idyllic refuge for the in-demand designer and shopkeeper, who recently opened a satellite of his West Coast home-furnishings mecca—a treasured resource for the Los Angeles design community—in New York City’s Greenwich Village (AD, June 2024).

Although the garden radiates the grace and texture of age, Nickey’s elegant wilderness is a completely new addition to the home he shares with his husband, real estate broker Greg Holcomb. Designed in 1927 by architects Webber, Staunton & Spaulding as the private residence of partner William F. Staunton Jr., the Spanish Revival–style main house belonged to Holcomb’s grandparents for two decades from the early 1950s to the 1970s. When Holcomb was born, his parents took him home from the hospital to this very site. In 2015, Nickey and Holcomb reclaimed the property, which had been expanded by its previous owner to include the adjoining land where the garden now stands. “It was basically a dirt lot,” the designer recalls. “But it had fantastic canyon views, some incredible trees, and lots of potential.”

Working in tandem with landscape designer Fi Campbell, Nickey’s first order of business was installing the focal pool, which they initially surrounded with various grasses. “Watering the grass was a nightmare, and it kept dying anyway, so we ripped it all out,” he says. For the next iteration, he and Holcomb reimagined the garden utilizing mostly native and drought-tolerant plantings—selected in consultation with the plant specialists at Hardy Californians—in a limited palette of purple, white, yellow, and green. On one side of the pool, svelte cypresses now flank a century-old California pepper tree that presides majestically over the landscape. At another end of the pool, Nickey and Campbell built a cedar pergola swathed in a glorious bank of wisteria. “The wisteria flowers for about a month, but that’s part of its charm. You appreciate it more because it’s only there for a certain amount of time,” the designer observes.

The garden is traversed via a network of pathways, meticulously plotted by Holcomb, that connect the pool to a cutting garden of roses and dahlias, vegetable and herb beds, and a chicken coop. “The paths provide a nice little racetrack for our dogs, which they love,” Nickey says, adding, “The garden is really a place for decompression. It keeps us all sane.”