After sculpting the backyard at their Eugene home into an English flower garden on one tier and leisurely brick patio on the other, David Edrington and B.K. Robinson needed a place to store tools, pot plants and tuck away bags of compost.
So Edrington designs a little something he refers to — with a straight face, no less — as his garden “shed.”
True enough, the 10-foot by 12-foot, two-level creation does have exposed framing — in early American style — on the inside. Old, reclaimed windows and recycled brick floors at ground level also betray a workaday purpose.
But the facade, inspired by the couple’s Romantic Revival home built in 1929, looks more like a miniature English cottage: super-steep roof, teensy dormers, green-shingled siding and adorable sitting porch with posts and beams supported by old-fashioned knee braces.
In the words of Marv Glover, who built the garden shed as College Hill’s resident general contractor, the wee potting cottage imparts a “Main Street Disney” enchantment.
“It’s that kind of scale — it has that kind of look,” Glover says. “It’s actually a child’s scale. I think it appeals to the children in all of us: cute little cottage in the backyard; basically a playhouse.”
Edrington, who just happens to be a long-time architect known for his Craftsman-style projects and charming cabin designs, indeed revealed his inner child in the shed’s design.
Still is revealing it, for that matter.
He and grandkids resort to the shed’s attic for Monopoly, watching Wi-Fi movies on the laptop, or calling a bluff in Big Hold ’Em. They climb up through pull-down attic stairs, then close barn-style doors behind them for extra floor space of rustic tongue-and-groove hemlock.
The slight shed dormers allow for two built-in twin beds; a lamp with table tucks into the center pitch. Just enough room remains for a few sleeping bags on foam pads.
“It’s like a giant fort that you can sleep in,” Edrington lauds.
But the shed earns its keep, too.
Garden tools and supplies stack against the exposed stud walls at ground level. Edrington and Robinson pot plants in a bench with sink, then start some seedlings— including tomatoes — beneath the south-facing windows of an old garage-style door fixed in place.
For tea-time breaks, the couple heat water on a butane campstove, then relax on a chair inside or lounge on the porch. “B.K. keeps a stash of tea bags, cups and saucers out there,” Edrington says.
Insulted with rigid foam and heated by an electric radiant panel, the shed remains cozy — and without musty odor — year-round.
Romantic charm
Outside, the shed nestles into a corner of the English flower garden like a storybook scene.
Only old-fashioned shingles would do for exterior siding, Edrington says, because both he and B.K. love quaint cladding on cabins, particularly those at the coast.
Interior designer Michelle Pellitier suggested blue/green for the shingles, matched by yellow window trim with rose sashes. To color the shingles, Glover’s crew hand-dipped each one in colored stain, then hung them on a clothes line to dry.
“They will retain their color that way, and (the stain) won’t peel off,” Glover says.
While Edrington matched the shed to his and Robinson’s home with its own steep roof and yesteryear charm factors, he kept it in scale with the garden.
The shed’s precipitous roof — at an 18/12 pitch — creates narrow gables and lower eaves befitting a backyard shelter. “The low edge on the porch roof brings the scale down to the edge of the garden,” Edrington explains.
Robinson loves how the shed frames roses and a colorful array of other perennials in what has become a wonderfully transformed backyard over the past five to six years.
Triggered by a problem
Something has to spark a backyard makeover, and for Edrington and Robinson it was a neighborhood project to take unsightly electric power lines and run them underground.
The couple decided to bury the power line at the back of their property under a basalt rock wall. “That’s what started it all,” Edrington says.
They never did like how their sloped backyard, heavy in clay, bogged with rain and drained downhill toward the house. They had nice plants back then, too, but the property’s English laurel had grown “quite tall,” Edrington says.
So they called in the Rexius excavation calvary and chiseled the backyard into an upper tier for the English flower garden and lower tier for the brick patio with basketball hoop and dining area below a pergola.
Over the past five years, Scapes Unlimited crews have stacked more basalt walls — 340 lineal feet, to be exact, at heights ranging from 2 to 5 feet — for bordering the home, alley and garden paths. The columnar basalt, quarried near Harrisburg, forms into rectangular lines.
Flowers thrive in the garden, thanks to a new layer of planting mix by Lane Forest Products. “We over-excavated about a foot for adding the planting mix,” Edrington says.
Large shrubs mark corner points, including lilacs, red currant and “River Road” rose, a hardy climber named for its apparent Eugene origins.
David Austin roses line the garden’s alley side, where campanula groundcover keeps weeds to a minimum. A fountain splashes at the center of the garden; espaliered apples and pears grow on the alley fence.
Peonies, echinacea, asters, dahlias, geranium, sweet William, robust mophead hydrangeas, black-eyed Susan, phlox and delightfully fragrant nicotiana, or flowering tobacco, bloom mostly in purples and pinks but in bolder spot colors as well.
But the garden’s star attraction remains the garden “shed,” which Edrington and Glover built a couple of years ago.
“It helps frame the yard nicely,” Robinson says. “Plus, it’s a nice fort for the kids to play in.”
Staff writer Kelly Fenley can be contacted at sp.feedback@registerguard.com.
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