By Pamela Ostermiller

	Click for more images Landscape designer: Mikel Covey and Traci O'Very Covey

Traci O’Very Covey keeps a garden box—a flat rattan attaché—that holds her original garden sketches and blueprints, including a drawing she did of her husband, Mikel, glass of wine in hand, standing by a grapevine-covered arched doorway. The image served as one of many inspirations for the landscape the couple would design to complement their 1914 Craftsman bungalow.

The Coveys purchased the Salt Lake City house more than a decade ago and completed a period-perfect restoration by the following spring. To do it right, the couple let the architecture be their guide. “When Traci and I saw the house, we thought, ‘What can we do to make the soul of this house come alive, to give it back its integrity?’” Mikel says. “Our house looks great because it had its own idea of what it was.”

The backyard, however, had lost its identity long before and resembled a vacant lot with a dog run and a rusty wire clothesline. “But, fortunately, it was also a blank slate,” says Mikel. Yet the garden presented another dilemma, adds Traci. “It was really small.” Their challenge became clear: Create a garden from scratch, in the space allowed, that would fit the architecture and their lifestyles.

The Coveys are artists—Mikel is a professional photographer, Traci a painter and illustrator—and have been husband-and-wife business partners for more than 15 years. Relying on their creative sensibilities, they hoped to design their garden as an extension of the architecture, a graft of dwelling and landscape. The result is a series of terraced rooms, entered through stained-glass French doors.

Beginning with a patio or “dining room,” the garden descends to a fountain and container garden and then steps down into the “living room,” a rectangle of lawn framed by raised beds that bloom in a cool palette of blues, violets, grays, and greens. Traci took a night class in garden design and got an overview of how to choose plantings for light, color, and texture, but more important, how to design a usable space. “We wanted a place where we could have coffee in the morning or sit in the evening and have a glass of wine, and have dinner parties and entertain,” she says.

The three areas amount to a café setting, a secret garden, and a courtyard surrounded by high stucco walls draped with ivy and clematis, inspired by the couple’s love of European and English gardens. In the dining area, the Coveys used rustic gray sandstone, a Craftsman feature, and planted window boxes in whites, pale pinks, and variegated greens that glow at night. For the foundation of the fountain level (which could be dubbed the “music room” for its soothing sounds), they used brick from an old chimney, discovered in the attic during the restoration. Numerous pots, holding fragrant herbs and colorful annuals, cluster around the fountain. In the living area, there is plenty of space—just enough lawn to mow and a bench and arbor for relaxing. A honey locust tree provides dappled shade.

Traci designed the beds in horseshoe patterns situated perpendicularly to the house, creating points of interest that give a sense of depth and lead the eye from one level to the next. Combined with the cool palette, which creates spaciousness, the problem of size is solved with grace and beauty.