Landscape & Gardens
An Urban Landscape
With the help of architect David DiMarco, these Capitol Hill residents transformed a once-disorganized urban space into a sprawling rooftop garden with room for vegetables, flowers and art
BY
Justin Henderson
PHOTOGRAPHY
Andrew Drake


Greg Kucera and Larry Yocom relax on their dining patio.


The entry courtyard features a Zen-style reflecting pool with pumice stones. The galvanized tub contains a flowering magnolia tree. The wooden planter (left) contains a climbing rose.


Sheep tanks contain exotic and native cutting flowers, including crocosmia (foreground), red and golden raspberry bushes (right) and the kitchen garden in back. Delicate and exotic blooms are moved to the greenhouse in winter.


The front door is flanked by a planter with a passionflower vine; the sculpture is Spira by Mark Calderon.


A cross-town view of the Space Needle through the rooftop corn patch.


Architect David DiMarco crafted the garden’s trellises and screens using reclaimed cedar beams.


A weeping pine and pumice boulders lend character to an otherwise barren spot.


The metal planter has disappeared, buried in plants that include a robust Japanese maple; the sculpture at right is by John Buck.

Suburbanites with posh gardens have nothing on devoted urbanites Greg Kucera and Larry Yocom. Longtime mates and players in the art world—the Greg Kucera Gallery is one of Seattle’s most distinguished galleries, and Yocom runs Gallery Frames in Pioneer Square—the couple moved into their Capitol Hill rooftop condo ten years ago. Along with their 2,500-square-foot residence overlooking a busy stretch of Broadway, they took responsibility for about 15,000 square feet of outdoor space, which they have transformed over the years from a disorganized utilitarian rooftop into a sophisticated arrangement of gardens, patios and courtyards. “It’s a rather unusual place to live—with unusual gardens,” Kucera notes.

Two significant decisions by Kucera and Yocom shaped the evolution of this ongoing project. The first was hiring architect David DiMarco to help organize the disparate rooftop spaces and redesign the interiors of their residence.

“What we decided was to develop a more elegant sequence from the curb through the lobbies and to the roof,” DiMarco says. “The project is residential, but the scale is commercial, so everything is overscale in size.” Utilizing reclaimed cedar posts, the architect constructed a series of muscular trellises, privacy screens and other space-shaping elements. DiMarco also reworked a few hundred red concrete pavers, already on-site, from what he termed an “’80s zigzag pattern into a more axial form.” (Kucera hated the red color of these pavers, but there they were, not to be wasted—and with time and grime, he observes, they’ve faded to an acceptable hue.)

Kucera and Yocom share their rooftop with the owners of one other similarly sized condominium unit. Because the other residence had no privacy, DiMarco created a patio with a cedar screen to shield the owners’ front door from the central, shared-entry courtyard. The architect also made a small, metal-lined reflecting pool in the courtyard. Kucera then placed several large pumice boulders in the gravel beds surrounding the reflecting pool to give the space the look of a Zen garden.

DiMarco also designed and built cedar arbors outside the bedrooms for shade and privacy and helped Kucera and Yocom create an alfresco dining space in the patio adjacent to their condo’s kitchen and dining room. Here, the arbor and trellis—foundation for an almost tropically dense array of plantings—create shade and segment the patio into more intimate volumes. Kucera, who describes this space overlooking one of Capitol Hill’s busiest streets as “amazingly private,” used the leftover wood from the trellises and arbors to make a small pond with a metal liner and a circulating water feature, providing the soothing sight and sound of flowing water in this intensely urban locale.

Kucera’s roots in rural Washington state—he hails from Gold Bar, on the Skykomish River—perhaps inspired the second significant decision: to use low-cost, galvanized-metal livestock feed tubs as giant planters. A total of eight of these tubs are deployed on the rooftop, purchased and delivered from a farm supply store in Enumclaw. Kucera recalls hiring about half of a University of Washington fraternity to muscle them up to the roof. Along with 10 9-foot-by-3-foot sheep tanks and a number of ceramic and terra-cotta pots, the feed tubs contain a diverse world of plantings: edibles such as corn, eggplant, lettuce and tomatoes; berry bushes; bonsai arrangements; native Northwest trees; and numerous native and exotic flowers and shrubs. Kucera and Yocom also maintain a small greenhouse to shelter the more delicate blooms in winter.

Nor was the rooftop siting of these tanks guided only by aesthetic considerations. An engineer advised them to position the tanks atop structural beams and to fill them with lightweight soil. All of the containers are about 2 feet in height, and Kucera notes, “As the plants grow, the tanks disappear.”

Regardless of all the architecture and design discussion, the essence of this garden lies with its plants—what they are and where these avid urban gardeners have arranged them in their giant pots. A deep appreciation for Northwestern horticulture is at work here, and these oversized planters are, literally, vehicles for a shared passion for gardening. Kucera and Yocom have used flora—trees, shrubs, fruits and vegetables, both native and exotic—to make a verdant, inviting world out of the once-barren environs of an urban retail rooftop.

Design Details

Architect
David DiMarco, DiMarco Architecture, 1319 E. Howell St., (206) 355-6795

Structural Engineers
Cary Kopczynski & Company Inc. P.S., 10500 N.E. Eighth St., Ste. 800, Bellevue, (425) 455-2114

Andy Herrick, Sliderule Engineering Works, 1932 First Ave., Ste. 809, (206) 728-4844