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A North Toronto couple with a yen for Zen didn't have a crystal ball when they spent $250,000 to turn their backyard into a Japanese paradise almost 20 years ago. They didn't divine today's snarled weekend traffic and high gas prices — they just worked long hours and had no time to travel to cottage country.
But looking back on it, they may have been onto something. Indeed, investing in the backyard has become a very viable alternative to owning a summer vacation property, according to landscape designer Kennedy McRae.
The whole backyard versus cottage conundrum is something facing many of Mr. McRae's clients. A partner at Earth Inc. and co-host of HGTV's new show Dirty Business (it debuts locally on July 1 at 8 p.m.), he says people are spending upwards of $70,000 to give their homes the same relaxation factor many cottagers drive 2-1/2 hours to get. "The question is, do we have a cottage or do we just make the backyard look spectacular for less money?"
A couple of years ago, his firm was hired to beautify a client's cottage after landscaping the family's renovated home and new pool. The project was subsequently scrapped at the design stage when the cottage was put up for sale.
The pond-like swimming pool and other landscape features create the feeling of a Japanese garden. (TORY ZIMMERMAN FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
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Mr. McRae recalls being told: "'Now that we have this house and the kids are swimming in the pool, they don't want to go up and swim in the lake. It's cold and it's weedy. There's no reason to go all the way up there.'"
The owner of the Japanese-inspired yard, a corporate lawyer who works most weekends (and prefers to remain anonymous), can relate.
"We needed to have something where I could come in the front door, take off my suit and tie and go into another world in 10 seconds," he says, looking out on his pond-like, black-bottom swimming pool as a waterfall trickles in the background.
As serene as San Francisco's famous Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park (albeit smaller but much more fun thanks to the pool, hot tub and covered patio with wine fridge), the 100- by 60-foot yard is a "peaceful oasis of water, stone and wood," according to his wife, a teacher. "It has a calming effect."
In fact, no Zen-like stone was left unturned in creating the spectacular space — from the thematic foreshadowing on the cedar gate outside (inscribed "mon yume," meaning "heavenly gate") to the mature bonsai, Japanese maple and katsura trees to the traditional Japanese upturned rooflines designed onto the fencing, kids' tree house and striking pagoda cabana.
With its tempered, sandblasted sliding glass doors made to resemble rice paper, the 200-square-foot cabana/guesthouse features two bedrooms/change rooms, a bathroom and sauna. It offers a view of the waterfall and opens to a dock-like cedar deck with an overhang.
"When you have the lights on at night, it looks like the water's underneath it so that the pagoda looks like it's floating," he says.
While poolside pavilions are certainly nothing new, architect Lorne Rose says they have been getting bigger and more lavish over the past two years. Cabanas with full working kitchens, living rooms with flat-screen TVs and basements that store the pool equipment are becoming popular. "They're like little houses," he says.
Mr. Rose is designing cabanas, which range in size from 450 to almost 800 square feet and typically cost between $100,000 and $500,000 ($10,000 gets you "something simple"). Then again, he says, they're for homeowners who don't have cottages. "They're trying to make their backyard their place to be on the weekend or in the evenings when they're trying to relax."
There's no doubt that times have changed. Backyards are not what they used to be, but neither are cottages, Mr. McRae says. "People don't build cottages any more in the romantic version of what cottages were when there was no heating and they weren't winterized," he notes. For many, they have become luxurious second homes that come with high upkeep costs.
Virginia Mullin grew up having a cottage but says she and her husband opted to landscape their yard and get a pool four years ago, because of his busy workweek and "the way traffic is now."
This spring, the Oakville family installed solar panels to bring down the heating costs, but even if they hadn't put them in, she wouldn't have thought twice about getting a pool, Ms. Mullin says. It's a lifestyle choice just like having a cottage, she adds, wondering if rising fuel costs will have an effect on cottagers.
"Does a family factor that in every time? Or is it that you decide this is your lifestyle choice and you embrace it and you do it," she says. "And you don't look at, 'Oh, it's this much money this weekend to fill up my car with gas.'"
Mr. McRae believes gas prices "may have some bearing" on the thinking of cottagers who drive back and forth every weekend and calculate how much they spend in a year, compared with those who drive up sporadically, but the jury's still out.
Either way, the road less travelled literally makes a lot more sense to him. "[The cottage] has a major, major relaxing component to it, but the drive there and back isn't part of that relaxation typically." He says there's nothing more relaxing at the end of the workweek than realizing, "I don't have to get back in the car. I mean — oh, my god — it's like a dream."
