Most people begin a home renovation project with the spaces they’ll use every day—the kitchen, a bathroom, maybe even a laundry room. But for California-based designer Alison Pickart, who is restoring a 1927 estate in her Wisconsin hometown, it was imperative that she start with the property’s garden.
“This house is a ten-minute bike ride from where I grew up,” says Pickart, of the property she and her husband purchased from the original owner’s son, who had inherited it. “We would ride bikes up to the bridge and I would sit outside the gates and wonder who lived there. Part of the intrigue was this beautiful formal garden.”
That owner, known to Pickart as “Cissy,” had been a master gardener and, with the help of landscape architects Franz Lipp and Judith Z., Stark had created a formal garden featuring sculpture, a fountain, parterres, roses, beds of iris and phlox, a large vegetable garden—and beautiful wooden treillage.
But by the time Pickart purchased the property, the garden had been stripped of its plantings and the treillage replaced by an iron fence. “Once the property was ours, I made the rose garden my top priority,” says Pickart. “It was Cissy’s ghost whispering in my ear.” Replacing the treillage, which Pickart notes was “paramount to this restoration as it was such a charming and iconic feature of the property,” proved more challenging than she expected, however.
Recreating it in wood proved cost-prohibitive—especially considering the material’s durability challenges. “We really wanted to do it in a way that would stand up to the environmental elements the Midwest is known for,” says Pickart.
So the designer made a call to The AZEK Company (which has since become part of James Hardie), manufacturer of durable, wood-alternative outdoor living products, with whom she’d worked on various waterfront properties. It had dawned on Pickart that treillage is simply a system of horizontal rails and posts with lattice in between, and that AZEK’s subsidiary INTEX, which produces highly custom designs for the parent company, could make her lattice.
Brige Lane Home & Garden’s treillage systemCourtesy of Bridge Lane Home & Garden
“I started the process of designing the rose garden treillage as a custom system for my own home, but as we really got into it, I realized that the beauty of an ornamental fencing system like this is the pattern and symmetry that emerges from the layout,” says Pickart. “Once I realized that we were repeating elements and panel sizes to create the design, it seemed obvious that this could be a modular product…available in panels with standardized widths and heights that could fit together in any number of arrangements to fit anyone’s garden.” Thus, Bridge Lane Home & Garden, Pickart’s classically inspired yet ultra-durable treillage system was born.
Developed with and manufactured in the U.S. by INTEX by AZEK, the collection includes standalone panels, gates, and screens and enclosures made of recycled PVC with aluminum reinforcement. Bridge Lane products are available in eight signature colors but can also be made in any paint color, and the products within the collection can be customized to a designer’s specifications.
Perhaps the best part is how easy the panels are to assemble. The panels can be either set into the ground or surface mounted on an existing deck or patio. Since they are modular and come in multiple heights—ranging from 2 to 6 feet—you can create a bespoke perimeter to enclose a formal garden, define a courtyard or tennis court, or frame your property boundary.
Bridge Lane Home & Garden products are available through Harbinger; interested customers can also request a quote through Bridge Lane Home & Garden’s website.
“As a designer, working in this industry for almost 30 years, I am acutely aware of the fact that products that are easy to use and specify, quality made, and beautiful are the products that wind up in people’s homes,” says Pickart. “I hope to bring that understanding to the product as we bring it to market.”
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