Rockville, Maryland (PRWEB) March 16, 2015

With spring right around the corner, this issue showcases award-winning landscape and remodeling projects by the region's top architects, interior designers and landscape professionals. These stunning designs are sure to provide fresh and inspiring ideas for the home. This issue also features the hottest picks in home technology from the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The latest in fine furniture is spotlighted and combines style and sophistication.

Further highlights from this issue include Excellence in Landscaping, where four award-winning projects deliver alluring outdoor escapes; Glass House, where a design team creates a light-filled modern retreat on the Magothy River; Simply Chic, where interior designer Erica Burns combines function and period style in a Northwest DC home; Modern Aerie, where Patrick Brian Jones revamps a Logan Circle penthouse with a vibrant modern art collection in mind; Rivers Edge, where Architect Jim Rill and designer Jodi Macklin focus on stunning water vistas in a waterfront renovation and H&D Luxury Remodeling, where four custom-home remodeling projects are featured.

An excerpt from Glass House: It gets better, whispers architect Scarlett Breeding, touring a new home she designed near Annapolis. Surveying this virtually transparent steel, glass and stone creation with sweeping water views, a visitor wonders what could possibly get any better than this.

The owner assembled a team of experts he knew could create the modern retreat he imagined. Scarlett Breeding, landscape architect Kevin Campion, builder Bret Anderson and interior designer Helen Sullivan had already collaborated on his DC home and other residences. Together, they delved into the projectpossibly one of their most challenging to date.

As a starting point, Breeding found inspiration in the local vernacular. The form comes from the traditional Chesapeake cottage, with its simple gabled roof, she explains. There is one gable form in the middle and matching ones on either side. We reduced them to their simplest elements, then subtracted out the roof and wall planes so they became far more transparent, to maximize light and views. Even the garage doors are glass.

Dormers and skylights create lofty second-story spaces, yet allow the house to maintain a single-story presence. It has large room volumes but does not feel inappropriate for the neighborhood, which is primarily cottages, says Breeding.

As always, this issue's Indulgences section tempts everyone with the best of the good life in travel, toys, spring fashion and food. It's an issue you won't want to miss!

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The Spring 2015 Issue of HOME & DESIGN Magazine is Now on Newsstands

At the private Witt Ranch, historic trees establish a sense of history in a landscape that combines personal favorites and native plants. (Santa Barbara Botanic Garden photo)

By Rebecca Mordini for the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden | Published on 03.16.2015 9:27 a.m.

The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden has put together a truly unique version of its annual Cultivating the Wild: Native Gardens Tour on Sunday, April 19.

Heading out to the Santa Ynez Valley in limousine buses, the tour goes behind the scenes to explore very different approaches to sustainable landscaping. Dry farming at a vineyard, personal style at a private ranchero and an entire neighborhood of native landscaping all challenge preconceived ideas about the limitations imposed by drought. This years tour includes the delicious culinary creativity of New West Catering enjoyed with dry farmed Stolpman wines at the private Montanaro Farm.

Landscape architect Puck Erickson provides the foundation of the tour at the Santa Ynez Valley Botanic Garden. As one its founders and designers, she identifies key native plants in the area, and gives an inspiring view of how creating this garden brought a community of native plant lovers together.

After 19 harvests were just as obsessed with improving our wines as we were with our first vintage in 1994, according to Peter Stolpman, managing partner of Stolpman Vineyard.

The vineyard implements sustainable viticulture techniques, including dry farming, in which the vines are not irrigated after they have matured. A personal tour from the owners will give a rare view, and taste, of dry farming.

What would it look like if everyone replaced their lawns with native landscaping? Guests will see for themselves in the tour through the gated Mission Oaks community in Solvang. The common areas are landscaped predominately in native plants that blend seamlessly into the surrounding landscape, while front yards show the wide variety of personal expression available using natives.

Witt Ranch is a private ranchero where historic trees establish a sense of history in a landscape that combines personal favorites and native plants. A guided tour of the gardens around the main house and the charming guest cottages will inspire your own landscape designs.

Guests who wonder just how good a dry farmed vintage actually tastes, will not be disappointed as Stolpman wines will be served with a mouth-watering lunch from New West Catering. Valley insiders know that New West is owned by the same chefs as the eclectic Industrial Eats, one of the hottest dining destinations in the area. To complete this incredible insiders experience of the valley, this delicious meal is served at Montanaro Farm, where visitors are transported back to Californias ranching heyday in the original grocery restored to its 1887 style.

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Botanic Garden Tour to Showcase Creative Ways to Garden with Little Water

A Little Chaos - Sneak Peek - in Cinemas 17th April
Watch this sneak peek of A Little Choas, in cinemas April 17th, starring Kate Winslet, Matthias Schoenaerts and Alan Rickman. Madame Sabine De Barra (Kate Winslet) is an unlikely candidate...

By: LionsgateFilmsUK

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A Little Chaos - Sneak Peek - in Cinemas 17th April - Video

Custom Outdoor Living
Your home landscape is more than just grass and flowers; it can truly be turned into a livingspace. Here to discuss the latest trends and technology, the difference between a Landscape Architect...

By: todaystmj4

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Custom Outdoor Living - Video

A Little Chaos - Official Trailer - in Cinemas 17th April
Madame Sabine De Barra (Kate Winslet) is an unlikely candidate for landscape architect of the stillto-be-completed Palace of Versailles. She has little time...

By: LionsgateFilmsUK

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A Little Chaos - Official Trailer - in Cinemas 17th April - Video

Best Landscape Architect Los Angeles County CA
http://youtu.be/w3KyA5K8sWc Takahashi Associates was established by Hiroshi Takahashi providing a wide variety of Landscape Architectural services to the public and private sectors for over...

By: Takahashi Associates

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Best Landscape Architect Los Angeles County CA - Video

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander speaks at Sam Sullivan #39;s February 2015 Public Salon
Landscape Architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander speaks at Sam Sullivan #39;s Public Salon on February 2015 in Vancouver BC. Presented by Scotiabank and Global Civic Policy Society (http://globalcivic.o.

By: GlobalCivic

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Cornelia Hahn Oberlander speaks at Sam Sullivan's February 2015 Public Salon - Video

Krish Vatika Residential Property in Bhiwadi
Krish Vatika offers you very spacious, luxurious, multistory apartments in a Wi-Fi campus. The beautiful central park is designed by professional landscape architect and this garden is one...

By: Krish Group

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Krish Vatika Residential Property in Bhiwadi - Video

Job Spotlight: Landscape architect and city planner Alina Phillips
Alina Phillips is a woman of many talents, making a decision upon entering college to become an early childhood teacher, the seeds of that planted as a young...

By: LedgerEnquirer

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Job Spotlight: Landscape architect and city planner Alina Phillips - Video

Maybe it's time to erect temporary, "proceed with caution" signs at the entrances to Chicago's Jackson and Washington parks. The signs would be directed not at drivers, but at President Barack and Michelle Obama, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Barack Obama Foundation.

I thought of the need for caution as I made my way through a fascinating new doorstop of a book, "The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Last Great Projects, 1890-1895." Its 1,067-pages offer revealing glimpses into the mind of America's greatest landscape architect, including his dealings with architect Daniel Burnham as the two titans planned the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Jackson Park.

The letters express the essence of Olmsted's approach: Naturalistic scenery is preferable to formal pomp; the parts of a landscape should be subordinate to the whole; details matter as much as the grand sweep of things oh do they matter!

To enliven Jackson Park's lagoons for the 1893 fair, Olmsted brought in about 50 electric launches, with colorful awnings, and imported from Venice 20 gondolas, complete with their gondoliers. The chief purpose of the boats, he told Burnham, was less to get fair-goers from Point A to Point B than to provide delightful scenery.

"Put in the waters unbecoming boats and the effect would be utterly disgusting," Olmsted wrote Burnham, who was considering the use of more cost-effective but less attractive craft.

Under normal circumstances, such observations might be of interest only to scholars and fans of landscape architecture.

But they take on fresh relevance as the Chicago-based Obama Foundation nears a decision on which of four competing proposals from Columbia University in New York, the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Chicago will win the Obama presidential library and museum bake-off. Obama met with his foundation's leaders last week during his stop in Chicago to make the Pullman district a national monument.

Olmsted's parks are national treasures. They demand to be treated with the utmost care, not trampled in a rush for economic growth. As I read Olmsted's letters, I had to wonder: What would he have thought of the U. of C.'s proposals, in which the Obama library would rise in either Jackson Park or Washington Park, another Olmsted design?

"He was generally averse to adding different types of structures to the parks," said the co-editor of the new Olmsted book, David Schuyler, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College. "He thought it compromised the very purpose of having a large urban park."

Building the Obama library along, rather than in, public parkland would be an ideal compromise. That can't be done at the 21-acre Jackson Park site, all of which lies within the park. But it could happen along Washington Park if the library were to be built solely on the 11-acre portion of the site that's outside the park's borders. Leave Washington Park itself alone and all the talk about land grabs and lawsuits would go away.

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Plan for Obama library in Chicago must respect Frederick Law Olmsted parks