Have you visited the Olive Garden in Brandon recently?

If you have, you surely noticed some changes.

The Olive Garden at 2602 W. Brandon Blvd., Brandon, has undergone a renovation as part of the final phase of testing of the company’s new Via Tuscany remodel program, updating the look and feel of approximately 20 Olive Garden restaurants in eight markets.

The remodel is designed to upgrade and unify the look of restaurants nationwide.  

The Brandon restaurant’s interior and exterior have been updated with new design elements. The rustic stone exterior is typical of the buildings in the Italian countryside, and the interior is accented by Italian imports and fitted with up-to-date LED lighting. Ceilings supported by exposed wood beams, stone and wood accents and terra cotta tile highlight the interior. Vibrant imported fabrics decorate windows and dining seats, and artwork featuring a variety of Tuscan scenery, from a piazza to secluded village towns, adorns rustic stone and stucco walls.

The remodel is inspired by the farmhouses that dot the landscape throughout the Tuscany region of Italy.

For more details, click here.

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About this blog

An insider’s look at must-have products, fresh trends, and inspired spaces from the team at Design New England magazine.

Gail Ravgiala is editor of Design New England and a fan of both the region’s historic architecture and its growing inventory of modern houses and public buildings.

Courtney Kasianowicz is associate editor of Design New England who scouts the area for new design, charming products, and local artisans both innovative and daring.

Danielle Ossher expands our market watch, scoping out trends, products, and all things new and exciting from NYC and beyond.

Jill Connors, Design New England’s editor-at-large, is an antiques maven and design scout and will post about trends and discoveries in the field.

Bruce Irving, Design New England’s contributing editor for architecture building, is a renovation specialist who will share his insights on design and construction.

Estelle Bond Guralnick, Design New England’s style interiors editor, will post about interior design and interior designers and her favorite finds.

Angela Jones

Closet Factory, Raleigh 919-669-7988 or angela.jones@raleighclosetfactory.com

Design philosophy in 10 words: Creativity trumps money in creating the “wow” factor.

Best decor bargain I ever scored: Fabulous antique crystal chandelier found in a box on the floor of a thrift shop in Clayton – $120.

No-cost or low-cost way to improve kitchen cabinet organization: If you are designing a new kitchen, keep in mind that deep drawers function more efficiently than base cabinets with doors. In an existing kitchen, separate various categories of ingredients, equipment and utensils. Organize with drawer dividers, multi-sized plastic bins and cubbies. Arrange according to frequency of use. Adding pull-out trays is a huge improvement over stationary shelves in base cabinets.

Every child’s closet should have: Rods and shelving that your child can easily reach. With these, a child will begin to get ready for the day independently and become responsible for putting their clothes up at the end of the day. Include a hamper in the design. A child begin to appreciate the value of staying organized in every stage of managing clothing.

Every master bedroom closet needs: To maximize every inch of available space. The best time to start planning fabulous closets is before building plans are finalized. A few minor changes at that point can greatly increase storage and function. Most closets have tons of wasted space. Equally important is adjustability. Shelves, rods and other components can be moved, adjusted or removed to accommodate evolving needs. Favorite design blog: Houzz.com. I like the way it’s organized; you can designate any area of the house or any feature and find really creative solutions and pictures too. It’s a great place to get ideas.

Favorite repurposing project: Two current projects are tied. In one, I am repurposing a spare bedroom into a luxury custom closet with shoe wall and granite-topped island with velvet-lined jewelry drawers. In another, we are repurposing a spare bedroom into a study/home office with custom decorative wall paneling and desk. As part of this, we are converting the walk-in closet into bookshelves and filing cabinets with a printer station.

Biggest design no-no: Being misled by deceptive advertising. I am always on the lookout for a bargain, but you must always consider quality and customer service in your decision-making. The lowest price is not always the best value.

My best tip for do-it-yourself designers: Keep a file of rooms you like from magazines and online. After you accumulate a few, spread them out and you will find there is some common thread throughout. It might be a color combination, a mix of patterns or a specific decorating style. There will be something consistent in those pages that will give you a starting point in planning your design. Also, be on the lookout for interesting things everywhere you go. I am always on a treasure hunt!

Christine Wilkie is one of four finalists

Max Walters, Reporter
Sunday, April 7, 2013
8:00 AM

Christine Wilkie is one of four battling it out in the Grand Designs Live competition

A garden designer from Wembley is celebrating after reaching the finals of a prestigious competition.

Christine Wilkie is one of four finalists in the Grand Designs Live competition.

The contest, which is based on the Channel 4 TV series aims to find winners across a range of categories including garden design and home improvement.

Ms Wilkie, who lives in Norval Road, has been shortlisted for her garden design creation which will now be judged by a panel including host of the TV show Kevin Mcleod at the Excell Arena in May.

The 52-year-old, who only took up the hobby in 2008, told the Times: “I’m really delighted to have been selected it’s a huge honour.”

The design, called Glow, had to meet Grand Designs’ ethos of contemporary, inspirational, ethical/environmental.

Grand Designs Live London takes place at the Excel in Docklands, from May 4 to 12.

If Ms Wilkie is crowned the winner she will claim the title of garden designer of the year.

For more information on Christine and her company Christine Wilkie Garden Design call 020 8904 4157 or go to www.christinewilkie.co.uk

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Posted on: 9:00 am, April 6, 2013, by Jackie Lewandoski, updated on: 09:53am, April 6, 2013

NEW YORK—The Municipal Art Society (MAS) of New York has launched a design challenge for a new Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. As part of the challenge, four New York design firms will re-envision both spaces with a public unveiling of proposed plans slated for May 29.

The four firms participating in the challenge include Santiago Calatrava, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, SHoP Architects and SOM. Each firm will share their plans at the public May 29^th event at 242 West 41^st Street. The event will be open to the public but registration is required at www.mas.org.

“Consistent with our long-history of advocating for bold and ambitious approaches to New York City’s challenges — and a commitment to enhancing livability in New York — we have invited some of the best design firms in the world to help us re-think Penn Station and Madison Square Garden creating a world class train station and a world class arena,” said Vin Cipolla, president of MAS.

When the plans for Madison Square Garden and Penn Station were originated in 1963 by architect Charles Luckman, approximately 200,000 people per day were using Penn Station. Today, the station moves 640,000 people daily.

What do you find most intriguing about Japanese gardens?

First, I was struck by how many of these gardens existed and the diverse historical periods from which they came. I realized that Japanese-style gardens must be meaningful for Americans, and I was intrigued. I call them “Japanese-style” gardens because my central belief is that they tell us more about how Americans have wanted to see Japan or how Japanese have wanted their culture perceived in America.

Then how have Americans wanted to see Japan? How do you think the Japanese have wanted their culture perceived here?

Japanese gardens in America are, fundamentally, American gardens in a Japanese idiom. In my current book, I trace how the styles and meanings of Japanese gardens in America have evolved over a century from symbols of exotica and collecting of foreign things before World War II to emblems of a new understanding of the “authentic” Japan after the war.

In the prewar period, at commercial tea gardens and on private estates like the Huntington, Japan was imagined through gardens as a dainty land of artistic people. Gardens were in idealized rural hamlets where a house, pond and stream was given spiritual dimension through Buddhist images and Shinto shrines.

In the postwar era, the emphasis was often on bringing a “name” garden designer from Japan with the intention of reproducing design effects from Japanese gardens — winding stepping stone paths, hiding and revealing scenic elements, creating elegant teahouses redolent of shibui (refined elegance) instead of the red arched bridge of the earlier era. The large public gardens in Vancouver [Canada], Seattle and Portland [Oregon] would all exemplify this.

Plantings vary dramatically in the 26 gardens you feature — what grows in Southern California doesn’t thrive in Boston — but they are all Japanese-style gardens. How important is plant selection?

There was a time in America when it was thought that a Japanese-style garden had to have indigenous Japanese plants. But in the last hundred years or so, the Japanese-style garden has evolved so it’s not about kinds of plants but how we use them. We use North American substitutions for Japanese plants to the same effect — for textures or color tones or to help create complex, dimensional space.

Reading your book, it’s clear that the more one knows about Japanese-style gardens — history, design principles, symbolism — the more enriching a visit will be. But if we don’t have that knowledge, how can we best enjoy them?

Even most people living in 21st century Japan are not well versed in traditional garden design. Many in our field are concentrating on the sensibility of space and the visitor’s interaction with the environment rather than the cultural, historical aspects. A Japanese-style garden can have resonance and create positive experiences, and now we’re thinking of them in terms of wellness, physical and mental. There’s an emphasis on the calm that comes from a Japanese garden’s refined vision of nature. They invite us to slow down, open up our perception and change our thinking.

You dedicate an entire chapter of your book to Koichi Kawana, the late Japanese-born, Los Angeles-based designer who created gardens across the country, including Suiho’en (Garden of Water and Fragrance) at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys. Is there contemporary designer of Japanese-style gardens we should watch for?

There are many innovative builders of Japanese-style gardens in North America, but if you insist I name just one, it would be Hoichi Kurisu, who is based in Portland and South Florida. Japanese-style gardens in North America are evolving to fit the needs of Americans, emphasizing wellness and mindfulness through Japanese-based garden design, and Kurisu’s work in this area is influential.

home@latimes.com

For easy way to follow the L.A. scene, bookmark L.A. at Home and join us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Successful Garden Design is hosting a free online Garden Design Workshop, with international garden designer, Rachel Mathews. In the online workshop, Rachel will demonstrate a really simple technique that can be used on any garden.

Successful Garden Design is hosting a free online Garden Design Workshop for anyone wishing to learn how to DIY design a garden. It’s available to view between 12th – 17th April. The event is completely online and free to attend via the Successful Garden Design website or it can also be viewed directly on the Successful Garden Design Facebook page.

In the workshop, international garden designer, Rachel Mathews will demonstrate a simple technique she’s developed over the last twenty years that quickly and easily transforms a garden, without spending a fortune.

The garden Rachel will design in the workshop is a long, narrow garden that’s in need of a complete makeover. The homeowner wishes to have a contemporary style garden created on a very limited budget. That’s quite a challenge in a garden that’s over thirty-three metres (approximately one hundred and ten feet) long.

During the workshop, the entire process of how to design a garden from beginning to end will be demonstrated. Rachel will show all her tips and tricks that enable even a complete gardening novice to get to grips with their garden.

The original workshop was shown in March to a select audience. Here’s some of the comments they left afterwards:

“The workshop was fantastic! Just bought a house and will be moving in a week. Can’t wait to get in the yard. The workshop helped me think about my own design and start getting it on paper. Thank you Rachel! It’s a work in progress but you have inspired me greatly! Thanks” – Jennifer Schramm

“The workshop Rachel offered last weekend was so great! I’ve learned a lot of tricks to create my garden design! She explained very easily many things we have to think about when we design a garden. Thank you very much, Rachel, to share your knowledge! Sofia (from Barcelona, Spain)”

“I love the way you simplify what most books etc seem to (maybe purposefully) make complicated. In your courses it is all laid out with no essential little bit conveniently left out to make us feel we can’t do it. We can do it thanks to Rachel!Thank you from Joanna in Australia” – Joanna Rodwell

The workshop won’t be for everyone though. The methods that Rachel teaches in her online garden design courses and in this upcoming workshop are very counterintuitive. She focuses on what really makes for a great looking garden, rather than just taking the easy, but often false option, of planting, which is what many garden books tend to focus on.

For anyone willing to look past solely focusing on plants, this garden design workshop will be a real eye-opener and inspire gardeners everywhere.

To join in the free online Garden Design Workshop, just visit: http://www.courses.successfulgardendesign.com/ggf-workshop/

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If ever you should decide to redo your garden, sooner or later you’ll likely hear someone say, “Be sure to stay true to the surroundings.” It is one of those stock phrases that architects and decorators often use to suggest that the garden’s design shouldn’t veer far from the style of the home and interior, or that native plants and local aesthetics should be embraced. But for Lisa Gimmy, a landscape architect who has spent the last 20 years designing gardens around Southern California, the idea of staying true to your surroundings goes far deeper. For her, garden design is a matter of seamlessly integrating inside and out, lifestyle and landscape — and her solutions have yielded gardens that are livable above all else.

Many of the gardens she has designed, including the two featured here, belong to midcentury modern California homes. She’s a master at selecting plants and hardscape that not only work with the dry California climate but also with the horizontal lines and hard edges of modernist design. But Gimmy’s philosophy and approach to design is universal, and could just as easily apply to a farmhouse in the Midwest or New England.

More attuned to a home’s ethos and environment than her own personal vision, Gimmy does not have a signature style. It is possible to visit several of her gardens and not immediately realize they are by the same person. “There is not a look,” she says. “My gardens are more about the site, plants and views, and about finding a design that is in sync with the architecture and that allows the clients to live the life they imagine for themselves.”

A Holliston firm was one of the winners at the 2013 Boston Flower Garden Show.

Ahronian Landscaping Design Inc. of Holliston and Medway Garden Center, which joined forces on the exhibit entitled “Today’s Living Room,” won the Landscape Design Award I. The Landscape Design Council gives this award for excellence in landscape design of a professional garden exhibit. The exhibitors say their garden featured “a May time period full of fragrant flowering trees, shrubs, perennials, and annuals” and highlighted “gardening with edibles; an outdoor kitchen; a garden room with an outdoor fireplace and waterfall curtains; vertical gardens; a green roof; permeable surfaces; and rain gardens.”

Ahronian Landscaping Design is a custom landscape design-build firm. For more information, visit www.ahronian.com.

Medway Garden Center is a nursery, florist and garden center located in Medway. For more information, visit www.medwaygardens.com.

The Landscape Design Council panel of judges was made up of board members Jana Milbocker of Holliston, Joyce Bakshi of Andover and Mary Bowen Nokes of Lexington.

The Landscape Design Council of Massachusetts was organized in 1963 under the auspices of National Garden Clubs Inc. The council provides landscape-design education through speakers, workshops, and tours of public and private areas, according to a press release. The Massachusetts chapter is the largest in the United States. It provides judges for the Boston Flower Garden Show and presents three landscape-design awards of its own.

Design council members have completed the Landscape Design study program, four 10-hour courses, and passed required examinations, entitling them to become National Garden Clubs-accredited Landscape Design Consultants. Council members promote environmental interests through work on town committees and boards. Members have been responsible for many landscaping projects at municipal buildings and other public areas in their cities and towns. A number have gone on to earn certificates in landscape design or master’s degrees in landscape architecture, and to establish their own businesses.

For more information about the Landscape Design Study Program, contact program Chairman Jane O’Sullivan at 781-659-4423 or jeosullivan@comcast.net. For more information about LDC, contact chairman Joan Butler at 508-429-2739 or joan@bjbsoftware.com.