The Fantasy: A Fairytale Landscape

Having spent a lifetime photographing the phenomenal landscape designs and residential installations of Covington’s Nursery, by this point, I’ve pretty much seen it all. If it can be done, chances are we’ve done it, and I will admit there is a certain boredom that can emerge through repetition and inundation.

But when it came time to conceptualize my own landscape, even greater than the urge for EXPERIMENTATION AND INNOVATION was a desire to learn from the past — to consider all our prior successes and especially our failures — and then incorporate only the best of the best into my own design.

However, before you imagine my yard to be little more than a Frankensteined amalgamation of COVINGTON’S GREATEST HITS, keep in mind that just like the interior of New Moroxico, this outside world still needed to conform to my unique personal style.

Seldom does my inspiration come from places in America— or even reality — so this posed a very exciting challenge. In fact, half of the pictures in my inspiration folder weren’t even photographs, they were FANTASY DRAWINGS of fairytales and storybook cottages!

Crafting a Living Fiction

I have always struggled to find the perfect word or phrase to describe my unique style of home embellishment. In my twenties, I would sometimes use the pretentious moniker BOHEMIAN SOPHISTICATE to describe my style (which you’ll notice is just B.S., for short!), but I have since abandoned that for the even more preposterous portmanteau of “New Moroxico.”

There is some intentional silliness here, as both inside and outside the home I am trying to evoke a sense of HISTORICAL FANTASY— the beautiful fiction of a past that never really was.

But by always incorporating REAL ANTIQUITIES into my designs, it gives my fusion of disparate cultures a surreal credibility.