Redondo Landscape Architect Shares Spotlight in PV Garden Tour

One Palos Verdes Peninsula home has a special significance to 48-year-old Redondo Beach landscape architect Greg Abramowitz: he got his start building planters for Rickie Kalionzes when he was 11 years old.

Now he's come full circle. The Kalionzes' Rancho Palos Verdes garden, which he designed, is one of five featured on the 55th Annual Palos Verdes Garden Tour on May 14.

Head of Unique Environments, a company he founded while still in high school, the licensed general contractor, designer and sculptor has known Kalionzes all his life. 

"My parents moved into the house next door in 1964 when I was a year old," Abramowitz said. "They are still next door neighbors."

Now a resident of Redondo Beach, where he lives with his three children (his wife, Leanne, passed away after a skiing accident in 2002), Abramowitz recalls riding his bike around his RPV neighborhood and passing out business cards he made on a Xerox machine offering to mow lawns and weed gardens.  

Then Rickie Kalionzes asked him to build the planters. 

"I had to calculate the average square foot per ton of stone for the various thicknesses and then place the order for the concrete, mortar, and stone," he said, remembering how the supplier almost refused the order due to his little boy's voice.

When he designs for a client nowadays—whether a landscape or a house remodel—he interviews the owner to find out how they expect to use the space. 

"In this case, I knew exactly how the owner uses the space," Abramowitz said. "She loves to entertain, and often offers her home for parties, charities and weddings."

He recommended a hand-forged iron gazebo in one part of the garden and "repositioning" a concrete cherub fountain—a fountain he had designed for the family years earlier—from the patio to a spot behind the gazebo. 

The most difficult part of the gazebo, he said, was wiring it through one of the iron legs to power the chandelier and lines of tiny twinkling lights that mingle with climbing tea roses. All of the urns and planters are strung with lights, creating a magical environment at night, he said.

In another part of the garden, a bright blue ceramic pot rests atop a pedestal. "The planter is filled mostly with succulents, which are gaining popularity again in local garden design," Abramowitz said.

"The area just outside of the planter is called a knot garden," he said, explaining how he planted a groundcover of mondo grass, campanula and alyssum in a geometric design meant to resemble a peacock's tail. 

After numerous sketches, it all came together, the gazebo equipped with patterned cushions and beige-trimmed white canvas drapes that slide easily onto removable rods for special occasions. 

"The gazebo has already been used for weddings," said Abramowitz, whose work has been featured on the Discovery Channel, the Home and Garden Network, and at the LA Garden Show, among others.

Other homes on the tour offer glimpses into notable accomplishments and celebrated lives.

The late Ralph Jester, for example, was a good friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed a home consisting of a series of circular rooms for the costume designer in 1938. Although the "Ralph Jester Project" never materialized into a house, drawings and a model are on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. 

The Jesters' Portuguese Bend home (now occupied by Jester’s widow, Lois, and their son, Lee) was built in 1949, the work of Lloyd Wright, Frank's son, who designed the nearby Wayfarer's Chapel.

"The house has lots of glass," Lois Jester laughed, remarking on a singular trait of the Wrights: windows. Even the master bathroom is glass, she said, allowing tour visitors a peek at a bust of film star Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra in the 1934 film by the same name. 

The sculpture, like the costume designs in the dressing room, is vintage Ralph Jester, who was twice an Oscar nominee.

Built on a formation of hills that allow "an unsurpassed view" of the Pacific, the home is backed by gardens on various levels, including a rose garden, a cement wall plaque of St. Francis of Assisi from the Neighborhood Church, and Lois Jester's favorite, her "Secret Garden"—a tranquil spot with a rusted iron bird bath she treasures. 

Also in Portuguese Bend, noted architect Edward Carson Beall and his wife and interior design partner, Susan, have encompassed their home with treasured mementoes from their travels as well as locally produced art, including a stone Parthenon horse head cast from the original in the British Museum.

"Since the house and garden are quite busy with sculpture and stone, we wanted the garden to be very quiet (in terms of color)," Susan Beall said about the landscape blooming with agaves, cypress, pepper trees, Chinese Elms and a huge Italian Stone pine. 

Delights emerge, both architecturally and amidst the gardens: a Wisteria arbor, an antique window, a French stone fountain and a lantern-bearing gypsy.

"The rear garden is on four levels," Beall said, and includes a sculpture garden made from fragments from a Gothic altar in the Loire Valley.   

"There are lots of areas to sit and surprises around every corner," said Beall, who will convert a garage to a French bistro to serve box lunches to visitors.

Whether one is enjoying the ecologically green gardens surrounding John and Pat Lang's solar-powered home in Palos Verdes Estates or the meditative environment at Lily Wang's in Rancho Palos Verdes, the effects are as unique to the individuals as they are different from each other.

The idea behind Lily Wang's garden, she said, is to create a sense of serenity, "to leave the stress of the outside world on the sidewalk, and let the sound of water surround you."

Along with desert plants blooming with brilliant flowers that require little or no water, there are many varieties of roses, and each hand-chosen sego palm is a different shape, she said. Some of the palms are more than 15 years old. 

The bonsai trees and red maples around two koi ponds contribute to the Zen theme, Wang said, as do the spa waterfall and view of the sea beyond. 

Tickets for the 55th Annual Palos Verdes Garden Tour—$35 presale or $40 the day of the event—are available at the Yellow Vase Cafe in Malaga Cove, Nantucket Crossing in the Town and Country Shopping Center and in Redondo Beach. 

Or you may send a check along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope to PVWC, P.O. Box 851, Palos Verdes Estates, CA 90274, and tickets will be mailed, along with directions to the five homes featured on the tour.

Price includes a box lunch served at Edward and Susie Beall's, with proceeds from the tour going to scholarships and select charities. 

Marilouise Huff, chairwoman of the Palos Verdes Woman's Club-sponsored event, said shuttle buses parked at Shoreline Park in Abalone Cove will take visitors to homes in the gated Portuguese Bend area. 

For more information, call 310-541-1237 or 310-373-2558 or email PVWC1926@gmail.com.