Quick Takes With: Peter Harper (of Breland-Harper)

Los Angeles-based design firm Breland-Harper is responsible for some of our favorite projects, the kind of unfussy and airy, European-inflected homes with windows and back doors that always seem to be open to a garden of some sort. This is their unique talent: the ability to design homes that are in constant conversation with the world just outside it. “The integration of architectural, interior, and landscape design within our studio is a founding tenet of our practice,” they say on their website.

Which is why we’re excited to share co-founder Peter Harper’s Quick Takes today. For Peter, gardens, just like the rooms inside a home, are opportunities to communicate a mood and a viewpoint. His work—whether it’s designing a building, decorating a room, or drawing up with a planting scheme—is always effortless and unassuming. “Restraint is key—from considering every aspect of a project’s distinct identity before intervening to recognizing that a design need not be loud or extensive to be impactful,” he says. 

“Gardens are what we bring to them— imagination, poetry, romance,” he goes on. “What an exquisite medium in which to communicate.” We couldn’t agree more.

Your first garden memory:

Reading with my sister—we were perhaps three and four—under a weeping ornamental cherry tree in the garden of the first house I remember (the same tree was tied with bows in pink and blue when we were both born).

Garden-related book you return to time and again:

Edith Wharton and Maxfield Parrish’s Italian Villas and their Gardens. Truly some of the most beautiful drawings of anything, in particular of gardens, ever produced. And Russell Page’s The Education of A Gardener, for its beauty, honesty, and inspiration.

Instagram account that inspires you:

@nigelslater. What he has done on a very urban plot of land is magical.

Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

Romantic. Historicist. Wild.

Plant that makes you swoon:

Antique/garden Roses—really, in any color. Sometimes in life we are bombarded by facsimiles of beautiful things (hothouse roses, florist roses, red Valentine’s Day roses) and when you encounter the real thing—the form, the scent, and the color of the real thing—swoon.

Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

Beyond some rather virulent weeds I encounter daily, I will give you two: the pencil cactus and foxtail ferns. I am perhaps not enlightened enough yet to appreciate their beauty of utility in a garden composition.

Favorite go-to plant:

Laurus nobilis—a favorite hedge, treasured for its deep green leaf and dignified form. We cannot forget the upright rosemary—loose or clipped, it is incredibly durable and performs so well in a Californian garden. It is also a favorite low hedge. The two together are magic and signal home to me.

Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

You will lose things that you love in the garden—trees, wildlife, views, etc. These losses also become opportunities.

Unpopular gardening opinion:

Climbers are exquisite additions to most houses—people are so afraid of them carrying a house off its foundation. Also, bees have the right of way.

Gardening or design trend that needs to go:

Gardens that do not talk to the architecture they are in communion with, whether stylistically, formally, or functionally. Also, the ban on antique garden elements—urns, columns, ornate benches. One does not truly love gardens if they are not thrilled by happening upon some lichen-covered Diana the Huntress amongst a yew hedge.

Old wives’ tale gardening trick that actually works:

This is a garden-adjacent, more of a tool-shed trick. Peppermint oil in a kerosene lamp with a cotton wick will keep mice away. Also, do not irrigate under California native oak trees; they dislike it immensely and the Huntingtons, of the The Huntington Botanic Garden fame, learned the hard way and lost many specimens at the edge of the immense lawn at the approach to the house for this very reason.

Favorite gardening hack:

Using highly scented plans, such as woody herbs—lavenders, rosemary, thymes, etc.—as a natural barrier for gophers. They cannot abide the smell and they will stay away from these plants, but really their roots; in turn you have a de facto gopher fence.

Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.

After a day of pruning, containing plants, adjusting forms, and seeing beautiful seed pods, twigs, etc., we usually have a pile or two of what to many is garden waste around the garden, on terraces, and on paths. They are sorted and the choicest scraps are brought in to enjoy on a windowsill or side table. It is hard to throw away even scrap cuttings, as everything from a garden is a gift— no grouping of leaves or little stick is without its merits. It also does not feel like waste if it is appreciated. So much of gardening is about appreciation.

Every garden needs a…

A set of garden furniture, however minimal or abstract—a log, a flattish stone, or perhaps a belle epoque cast iron seat. Somewhere to read, to take tea, to rest in the shade on a hot day.

Tool you can’t live without:

Leather garden gloves. Truly, I present my work with my hands daily and they allow me to plunge forth with abandon and not worry as much about devastating my hands.

Go-to gardening outfit:

Very loose pleated khaki pants rolled at the waist and ankles, a white or blue button-down retired for garden pursuits, and, increasingly, a straw hat, something that should have started 15 years ago.

Favorite hardscaping material:

Gravel (inexpensive) or sand-set cobble or brick—again, affordable and easy for the home gardener to deploy on their own. Sometimes a brick path, only two pieces wide, can be a pathway to something unforgettable.

Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:

Sunset Nursery in Silver Lake, for daydreaming and picking up odds and ends. A proper neighborhood nursery for actual gardeners in the grand American tradition. Also, Nuccio’s Nurseries in Altadena for its sheer commitment to camellias and azaleas for decades. Someone’s passion for specific types of flowers, passed down through generations, which created one of the world’s great nurseries.

On your wishlist:

A piece of ground with a view of the ocean, perhaps previously improved, but wanting, and in need of form, color—romance.

Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:

The Allerton Garden, Kauai – For its imagination and beautiful, intimate history. Sometimes we must create our own Eden

The REAL reason you garden:

If you love nature and love being outside, you cannot help but love gardens. Gardens connect us with how people have engaged with place, with landscapes, for millennia. Gardens are also, I believe, inherently imaginative. They are by definition manmade. In turn, they are what we bring to them— imagination, poetry, romance. What an exquisite medium in which to communicate.

Thanks so much, Peter! (You can follow him on Instagram @breland_harper.)

For our full archive of Quick Takes, head here.