Venice Garden & Home Tour: four stops including Orson Bean and Alley Mills’ charmer

Bean and Mills spend a quiet moment on their front porch. The deck often doubles as an outdoor dining room facing the canal. “Sometimes we’ve had the most wonderful conversations with complete strangers walking by,” he says.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

In the cottage garden tradition, a tangle of annuals and perennials, including a sprawling nasturtium, thrives at the edge of Alley Mills and Orson Bean’s lawn.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

A hummingbird feasts on the nectar of the Mexican sage bloom, providing some animation in the landscape.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

Mr. Cute, Bean and Mills’ cat, provides even more.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

But much of the garden’s personality comes from retro, oversized restaurant and retail signs used as outdoor artworks. This one? “It’s from the ‘Simple Simon’ rhyme, but it was also the logo for Howard Johnson’s restaurants,” Bean says. Rendered in carnival-colored neon tubes, the once-ubiquitous image of a baker, a boy and his dog promised coffee and a slice of pie to drivers along the Jersey Turnpike.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

This one lights up at night. “It’s really just pop culture,” he says. “Advertising has always been part showbiz.”

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

Tucked next to a camellia shrub, a sign with chipped, fading paint advertises a sheet metal shop.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

The result is a charmer that feels remarkably large by Venice canal standards – probably because Bean and Mills have combined three adjacent properties over the years. Bean bought the first house for $113,000 in the early 1970s.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

Also on the Venice canals, interior designer and contractor Barbara Balaban has made the most of her 20-by-20-foot frontyard. Instead of a space-gobbling fountain, she created a tiny one — an 18-inch water feature that uses a recirculating pump bought at a home center. It’s located at the left edge of the patio concrete, near the door to the house. “I filled the top with river rocks and surrounded the fountain with a border of broken pottery,” Balaban says. “I just wanted the sound of water here.”  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

When they want a quiet Sunday morning brunch, Balaban and her partner, artist Yaacov Aloni, lounge in a U-shaped eating nook on the deck next to the house. “It’s like having a little sofa outdoors,” Balaban says. “We can sit here and be a little secluded from passersby.”  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

The nook’s table is set on wheels. A larger glass dining table — used for parties and set on the yard’s concrete pad — also is set on wheels.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

Studio City designers Carol Plotkin and Janet Hoskins helped Balaban rethink the minuscule landscape and incorporate a slim border filled with irises, roses, succulents and Mediterranean plants.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

Balaban moved to her canal cottage after her traditional Sherman Oaks house was destroyed in the 1994 earthquake. Her Venice garden incorporates broken pottery salvaged from that disaster, using the pieces in mosaics for the barbecue’s counter and a welcome mat at the front gate. “I reconstituted my grandmothers’ and mother’s dishes,” Balaban says, “and it gives me a big smile to see each piece.”

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

The splash of the fountain provides the soundtrack for Balaban’s garden.  (Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)

Tim and Robin Rudnick bought their Venice home in 1984 and later modernized the interior and built an L-shaped Arts and Crafts-style addition. The old and new portions of the family compound now embrace an intentionally tangled and untamed landscape designed by Tim, a building designer and artist. A naturalistic pond, about 25 feet across, occupies the center. Tim used the excavated dirt to build a mounded knoll between the pond and a wraparound deck.  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

Stepping through the opening in the ivy-clad fence surrounding the Rudnicks’ garden, some visitors may feel as though they have stepped back to an earlier Venice. “I like the old, tattered hippy cottage that we lived in and raised our kids — where everyone hung out on the old porch,” Tim Rudnick says.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

Visitors announce their arrival by striking a mallet on two bronze disks, suspended from the twining branches of the coral tree. Tim made one from the base of a salvaged clothing store fixture; the other is a recycled cymbal. He prefers their music to a regular doorbell. “One has a very resonant sound, and it goes on for 15 minutes,” he says. “The other makes a beautiful, contrasting sound.”  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

Salvaged objects serve as garden sculpture.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

Old timber saws hang as wall art.  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

“I had this beautiful photograph of a Buddhist garden in Japan, and I imagined our yard by looking at it,” Tim Rudnick says. “I loved the idea that, like a Japanese garden, you feel like you’re entering another world when you go through the gate.”

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

For a completely different atmosphere, peek behind the walls of designer Lenny Steinberg’s modern Venice residence. When she renovated a duplex into a contemporary single-family home on Ocean Front Walk, she looked for ways to bring the outdoors in.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

Steinberg inherited irregular-shaped North Carolina bluestone after a friend’s patio project fell through. Now the stone leads from the loft-like house, through a 17-foot opening in a retractable glass wall and onto the outdoor terrace, with the endless seascape in the distance. “The stones reflect the constant color of the ocean,” Steinberg says, “although that seems to change according to the light.”  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

Stacked stone creates a border in Steinberg’s garden.  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)

The rooftop view: sand, sea and sky. These gardens are all part of the Venice Garden & Home Tour, running from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 2. Tickets are $70 (children under 12 free), available for pickup on the day of the tour at the Neighborhood Youth Assn.’s Las Doradas Children’s Center, 804 Broadway, Venice. Information: (310) 821-1857, www.venicegardentour.org.

Click here to read the full story on the 2009 Venice Home and Garden Story.

And click here to see more Gardens of the Times.  (Stefano Paltera / For The Times)