Shortly after purchasing a vintage home near Xavier University, newlywed Susan Kenford took some visiting family members on a tour. “You could see the looks of disbelief on my parents’ faces,” she says. “I was leaving this perfectly charming cottage-style home in Mount Lookout, to move to a home that was clearly going to be a money pit. They looked shell-shocked.”
The house did indeed need a tremendous amount of work, but Susan and her husband Jim Huebner were up to the task. With guidance from architect Thomas Arnold at Environmetrics, Jim and his brother built a gorgeous, light-filled sunroom to replace a poorly-built screened porch that had a low roof and pitching floor.
Despite doing much of the home improvement work themselves, Susan and Jim felt that they needed professional help to plan and install the landscape. They called a friend of theirs, Andy Perrino, owner of Perrino Landscape.
This couple loves to entertain so the outdoor spaces needed to remain functional and still maintain a traditional, classical design style to match the house. The landscape does that beautifully. The transition from indoors to outdoors is easy and elegant. French doors open from the sunroom to a fountain area on one end of the home. The kitchen addition overlooks a spacious patio on the other. Every room opens up to a garden, and every window has a garden vista.
The goal in the fountain area was to integrate the beautiful sunroom with the landscaping. Susan envisioned the fountain, but Andy worked out the details. In this garden, traditional boxwood hedging mixes with red Knock Out roses. Serviceberry trees and dianthus bloom in the spring and give nice color before the roses start blooming.
Because the home lacks a back yard, the side yard next to the kitchen addition became the sensible place to put an outdoor sitting and dining area. This is where Susan and Jim have outdoor dinner parties, often making use of the built-in barbeque grill. They have hosted a baby shower that was an indoor/outdoor affair, and a couple of other larger group get-togethers. “We know Andy socially, so we have the same set of friends. When we had the first get-together of that group here, everybody wanted to see the recently Perrino-fied yard,” laughs Susan.
Here, Karen azaleas bloom in spring, followed by astilbe and impatiens in a shady corner. Oakleaf, Annabell and Endless Summer hydrangeas with their huge blossoms add color to the traditional green boxwood hedges. Norway Spruces provide privacy. Jim built the gazebo for Susan because she wanted a place to sit outside without bugs. He has installed a fan, which he hopes will disburse the mosquitoes, but if not, he will screen in the gazebo. A bistro table will provide a place for the couple to eat.
When Susan and Jim bought their home, there was no access to the front door from the street in front of the house. “In addition, the portico was pulling away from the house and there was only one pillar on each side to support it,” says Jim. It needed repair. This inspired the new walkway up to the front and the splendid veranda.
The lush lawn is a fine foil for roses, hollies and ivy, while classical urns overflow with flowers. “It ended up much grander that we first imagined!” says Susan.