Seattle Landscape Architect Brooks Kolb’s landscape renovation for a site in tiny Holly, on Hood Canal, was featured in the October 19, 2014 Fall Home Design issue of the Seattle Times’ “Pacific NW” Magazine. Owner Paige Stockley’s enthusiasm for Holly and for the amazing waterfront property she found and purchased there proved exactly the catalyst Brooks needed to do some of his best work. The highly diverse site is heavily wooded alongside its entrance at the road, from which it descends to a wetland, a lawn, a beach front, and a working salmon stream.

Brooks brought in the environmental team of Tom and Kathy Smayda, a hydraulic engineer and wetland biologist respectively, to restore the salmon stream and rescue the beach from erosion. After Paige obtained a Kitsap County permit to unclog a large culvert under the highway, chum salmon returned in droves for the first time in years. Tom artfully reshaped the banks of the creek, enabling nature to take over and finish the job on its own time. Kathy helped Brooks generate native planting palettes for the wetland, creek banks and beach areas.

Andrew Borges, architect, designed a Cape Cod-influenced beach house and small adjoining guest house for Paige, raised on stilts above the floodplain, so Brooks also had an ornamental landscape to design. The resulting plan features a large lawn for beach-front entertaining, bordered with shrubs and perennials, including one of Paige’s favorite ornamentals, the Limelight Hydrangea. A small garden surrounding a swale bordered by rocks and Rhododendrons links the main house to the guest house, knitting both together with a gravel parking court.

Interior Designer:  Michelle Burgess; Landscape Contractor: Madrona Point Landscaping.  All photographs by Benjamin Benschneider

This project was previously published in the October 2013 issue of “Coastal Living” Magazine – see the earlier related blog entry