Inside Stunning Homes That Embrace Nature _ Architectural Digest

My favorite architecture scene in all movies is when Dorothy opens the door and outside the door it's color from black and white. And that quite possibly is the first time most people had ever seen color film in their life. The right sort of build-up to something really beautiful. I call it choreography. The best way to experience architecture is by moving through it and scanning and looking around. And so if you realize that, then you can make the architecture amplify the place. I'm Jim Cutler, principal designer at Cutler Anderson Architects and I designed this place about 10 years ago. I got a call like we always do from potential clients and they had already chosen a piece of land. It was a hilltop and it was a really beautiful spot, but I needed to remind them that it's very easy to bring cars into places, but it's really hard to get them out. We were coming down from that hilltop and I noticed a visual clearing in the woods and I said, what's that over there? They said, oh, it's a logging pond. You know, it's all filled in. And I walked around and there's this wonderful tree stump outside here. And I said, you know, if I was going to design something for you, I'd design something here and I would integrate the building and the pond as one thing. And they asked me why, and I explained to them at that point in my career, I had become very averse to killing anything, any living thing. I mean, the world is just so beautiful and everything has the same right to be here, whether it's inanimate or a plant or a creature. For many years, I felt that fostering life, creating habitat is a high calling in life. You know, water fosters life and I could somehow integrate a pond in a building. If we build it, they will come. Put it that way. And one time I was out here with Michael, one half of the owners, and he's very in touch with the living world. So we were sitting out here in the evening. He said, you know, about 10 minutes, the flickers are going to come by and they're going to start eating the insects off the pond. 10 minutes, the flickers come by and then the swallows are going to come by. The swallows come in. It's getting a little dark. I think the bats are going to come in. This place had connected him to the rhythms of life that water fosters. The power of architecture is emotional. When you choose a place that you're going to dwell in, then there's an obligation to know that place well, because there's life. We're coming up the walk to the house and we deliberately parked guests far away and we designed it in a way to make it actually quite narrow. And you can see that you sense the clearing just by the amount of sky you can see beyond these trees. But to reinforce what happens when you walk in the front door that you open up to the pond, we even tighten the path up further. And then as you come on the house, you know there's something special on the other side of that door. And we wanted to give some implication we were going to get there, but the door then acts as the foil. I'm squeezing because the tighter it is, the bigger big feels. The lighter it is, the darker dark is. By contrast, they amplify one another. But I don't want to be like, boom, you know, to surprise you when you walk in the door. So I wanted to bring a little bit of the pond on that side. And I wanted you to see over the roof so you could sense the clearing on this side and create a level of anticipation of arriving somewhere. These are steel beams holding this up. The reason they're steel beams is we thought we'd have a lot of view. If I had to do this in wood, it would have been much thicker and deeper and we would have blocked view. So then you have to start using materials within their nature. Once you get going on a design, and if you're lucky, and if you're listening, it tells you what it wants. It's this sort of cacophony of different voices are made. The steel wants to show what it can do. The wood wants to show what it can do. You know, the forest wants to show its history and its nature. The water wants to show how it fosters life. How do you take all that cacophony of voices and turn it into a harmony? That's my job. The owners wanted the strongest connection to the pond as possible. So when we designed this, I had a lot of fun. Kind of see this right here? It's about a 400 pound piece of lead. And there's one on either side. It counterweight this door. Let's see if it'll open. Now that's an 800 pound door. And that wasn't so hard to lift because now you can see the all the way down here. And that is a heavy piece of lead. And so we have three of them, one at the kitchen, one at the living room, and one in the bedroom. So that when you're in the building, you don't necessarily need to be in the building. You can be in the pond. Oh, another frog. Nope, two frogs. Look at them. You got to have a place to dive off. You don't want to splash water back on the oak floor. And, you know, it just seemed like such a poetic spot to sit and eat. You can take it all in. All the sounds, all the animals, everything. And to some degree, you can take in the silence. It's a nice kitchen. We wanted to have a window there. And it was also the best possible place for the range. It was a fun thing to design. And it works, shockingly. Now the fireplace is the lateral stability. We're in a sizable earthquake zone. And if you do a roof like this, where you can see all the way from one end to the other, that's a lot of load up high. So that if an earthquake wants to move the building sideways, well, it's going to do it. And the only way to restrain that lateral movement is with some degree of mass or a structural stability in this axis. So the fireplace is a structural element. And it's, for me, a statement about the lateral forces that are endemic to this region. I'd say 95% of the building was from this region. And it's reflective of this region. Gulam beams were invented here. Vertical grain for plywood was invented here and comes here because it's the only place Douglas fir grows. And it's light. So it's well suited for structure. Cedar, which the outside of the building is made of, red cedar, which is from here. It's highly aerated. It's a very light, physically light wood. And it's extremely rot resistant. So we're using it within its nature. We're using the Douglas fir within its nature. So you'll notice there are little bits of concrete out on the corners here. They all line up. So when you look at the site plan of this, it looks like an ancient giant swimming pool that has been partly, let's say, subsumed by detritus and sediments. But still there's a vestige of that swimming pool. I look back on it now, I think that's a little bit of a foo-foo metaphor. But I wanted to create a sense of time. And by leaving objects in the landscape, it pushes the time reference from the project. Bedroom is pretty much all the same. And since one thing I would say is it is classed between living room and bedroom because we wanted the roof, which is the sheltering element, to be one continuous plane. It would be a parrot to make this feel more like a pavilion. You know, when you think of pavilions, think of an outdoor area under a roof. My God, that cat has a regal pose. See? I like that animal. He's a good one. And you have to walk outside to get the guest house. And I'll tell you, I built a little cabin for my daughter and myself. She actually helped build it when she was 11. And it's a wonderful thing. And it's only about 35 feet from the front door of our house. And there is not one night that goes by when I'm running back and forth and look out at the water or listen to the wind in the trees or look at the moon or what planets are coming by. And I had no hesitation in making that separation when you got to walk outside to get to another room of the house. When you go from this one to that one, you experience the outside. You hear the water. You see the water. And if it's windy, you hear the trees. If it's snowing or raining, you hear the water coming down in the pond. Why not experience the place fully? I mean, it's really a joy. I talked about architecture being shelter. We could take that and say it's clothing, right? Keeps you warm and dry. So if you're clothing the institution of family, you better know its anatomy. I mean, you're wearing a sweatshirt right now and it might be from the gap for all I know, but one size kind of fits all. It's got sleeves and a hole for your head and a piece to cover your trunk. But in a way, that's no different than this house. We're the institution of family that you're going to call. Because families have very specific qualities. There are public zones, like the room we're in. And there are private zones, like the bedrooms. And there are decision points, like entries, where you get to make a decision whether you want to participate on something public or you want to go to your private zone. And they don't want to mix. They want to have as much separation as possible. In small houses, that's tricky. But that's the anatomy you're trying to clothe. The only difference between me and the gap is you can think of me more as a civil rogue, you know, tailor. I tailor things. When you bring someone to an emotional understanding of things, of something that's beautiful, they learn to love it. And teaching people to love the living world is actually, I think, the highest quality that any human being could have. Because we're killing this place. I want to describe a method of working that is different than the mainstream. And I'm hoping that I get a few lucky souls that get it and move in that direction. Hi, AD. I'm Dakota. Welcome to my house. I moved here about five years ago, and it was the house I looked at and the first house I ever bought. I love wood, and I love light and windows and green, so I just fell in love. Ryan Murphy lived in this house first, and he loved it so much, too. But his family got bigger, so he moved out. Lucky. And this is the living room. I hang out in here. I read. People kind of are always coming in and out of my house. And everyone hangs out in this room, obviously, not only because it's a living room, but because it's, like, one of the only places to sit. The furniture is vintage, and the couches were original, and we recovered them in this amazing crushed mohair. And this table came with the house. I bought it with the house, which was lucky. It's pretty cool on the bottom. It's bamboo. The piano is vintage. It's an antique Wurlitzer. I play, like, badly. Hi. That's Zeppelin. He wants to show you his dinosaur. This is not an antique, this thing, but I have a record collection that goes all the way, and I just alphabetized them. And it's really exciting. Right now is Ram, Paul McCartney. It's a really great album and a really great album to listen to on vinyl. And this amazing thing happens at certain times of day, like, really early in the morning, 7 a.m. Light from the sun on the pool does this on the ceiling, and I think it's the coolest. This is my office. I read scripts in here. I have meetings in here sometimes. I actually don't really get any work done, because I get distracted by everything that's in here. My favorite thing about it, I guess, is these bookshelves that I built into the walls. Originally, they were just these really beautiful, like, clean wood slabs, and then they started to fall because I have a lot of books. These ones were sent to me by Patti Smith. I said, I love your poetry so much. I love your work. And so she wrote me a little note in all of these books that she sent me. This is a weird pile. Don't focus on this pile of books. Let's just put these ones in a different... We'll just put them down here. Go to a cooler pile. This is cool. It's a wax mushroom. This, I was working with Chanel a long time ago, and my alias was Punk Rock, and I thought that was funny. They're silly awards. I don't even know. I'm not an awards person. Barb is such a great character. Barb didn't come back in season two, did she? They totally forgot about Barb in The Upside Down. That sucks. She's still there. Oh, sex and the Constitution. That's a really interesting one. Sex, religion, and law from America's origins. Oh, Jesus. What a weird girl. This was a Polaroid of Hunter Thompson, who was my dad's best friend and a very dear godfather figure to me. And I love it so much, even with his boobies. This is an amazing photographer named Alice Mann, and she photographs these marching band girls in South Africa, and their energy is amazing, and it makes me feel hopeful. That is a photograph of my grandma at her house at Shambhala with one of her tigers. Let's go in the dining room. This table, actually, we designed it and had it made. I mean, it's a smaller room, and we didn't want to lose the rug and the light, and we kind of wanted the table to disappear. And these chairs look like little humans. They're so gorgeous. This I found on First Dibs, maybe? I f***ing love First Dibs so much. I have some crystals, yeah. This one is cool because it has a dandelion inside. Isn't that so cool? People tend to give crystals as gifts in LA, and that's great. I love them. There's a really big one over there in the corner. That guy, that crystal is crazy, and it projects good vibes into the house and at people. This is my little kitchen. We painted it. We painted it this green color. I love green. I lived in New York before I moved into this house, and then before I moved to New York, I lived in a house and I painted the kitchen green, but I totally f***ed up the color, and it was the most atrocious color green. It was so hardcore. It looked insane, terrible. But then I got it right on this one, I think. I love cooking. I cook a lot, and I bake a lot. I love limes. I love them. They're great. I love them so much, and I like to present them like this in my house. And how cool is this? It's dying, that plant, now that I'm looking at it. That's so sad. There we go. I never ever thought that I'd be a dish person because I don't get it at all, like the psychology of it. I don't understand why anyone would collect loads of dishes or people who have china and like china cabinets. I was always like, what? Why? I don't get it, but this is so cool. Here I am with loads of dishes. Look at these. Never have I used this. What is that for? Oh, it's for teacups. Got it. I mean, can you stand it? They're the coolest. Wouldn't you want to drink out of that? I never do because they're too cool. They're just for sitting in this cabinet. My company is called Tea Time Pictures, so tea is a big deal for me, but also caffeine is a big deal for me, which I need some of it now. That's upstairs where my bedroom is, but we're not going up there. This is outside. I wanted you to see this table and chairs over here because this was made out of the wood from Winston Churchill's yacht. I'm not lying. And I think that's the coolest thing ever. And look at how these chairs fit. Nobody can really sit in this table because the chairs wobble in these cracks and the slabs of pavement and people fall out of them and it sucks. But isn't that so satisfying and amazing? I planted this tree when I moved in and it was a little baby and I got some whoppers of lemons on that one. But this one, look, they're like perfectly placed oranges on this tree. Can you believe that? How beautifully they're placed. It's like I did it for this very reason. This was meant to be an herb garden and I never planted any herbs in it. And I'm just looking at it now and it looks so crazy in here. I didn't ever do anything and all this wild **** started growing in it. Like this guy. What are you even? Weeds. You know that on a lot of tea bags, they have little fortunes on the back of the tea tab. And I really take them very seriously. And one that I get all the time is the difference between a flower and a weed is judgment. So think about that. I finally recently got outdoor furniture. For a while it was looking pretty grim out here. This is like an amazing little double chair situation that I love. It's one piece. I thought it would be really, really pretty if there were some flowers and things out here because this house can tend to feel really masculine. These chairs are not meant to be put outside. They're very delicate and expensive, but they look so good out here. So who cares? My cat chicken is buried here, which is not funny, but I don't know why I think it's funny to tell you that. The pool is heated a little so I can go in it all the time. And also it doesn't really get cold here. Let's go up here. These are some stairs that lead you to this place up here, which is a hot tub, which is so cold. Bamboo grows so crazy fast. I don't know if you know that. And my neighbors on that side are in a war with me about how high the bamboo in the driveway is growing, which is insane because why would I want people to be able to see in my house? I can't believe that I'm even letting you guys in my house so they can just shove it. This is this gorgeous, just randomly placed flower arrangement. And that's my bedroom. Sneaky. Yeah, let's go back downstairs now. Zeppelin. Oh, don't. What are you going to do? Go get it. That one's probably lost forever. Thank you so much for coming, A.D. I hope you like the tour in my house, but I really would like for you to leave now, so beat it. A.D., hello. Come on in. It's the cleanest it'll ever be. So this is the biggest room in the house. It's the living room. And I wanted it to feel really expansive so somebody could be playing Rummikub over there. That's really the Rummikub table. And people could be sitting around the fire here. You know how you just imagine it and then someday you have a perfect moment where it actually comes true. That is like a kind of moment. Steve and Brookie and Eddie and I have worked together for a long time. And I sat down with them one time and said, OK, I know exactly the house I want to build. And I described it to him. Steve sent me a watercolor of it. And that is exactly the house we built. We so didn't change much that I started panicking in the middle of build. And I thought I never even made a Pinterest board. I never even showed him pictures from a magazine. I just told him what I wanted and he did it. And what if I hate it? But it turns out I'm really, really happy. The paintings are both by Reiner and Driessen. This is Victor Garber's husband. And in that one, there's a little photograph of Victor and me painted into the painting. And so it's extra special, dear to me. This is by Reed Bradley at Judson Studios. He is the son of a friend of mine, Marla Frazee. She's my favorite children's book author. I wanted it to be evocative of spring in West Virginia. And you see like the morning glories coming down and a little bit of the mountains in the distance. A special feature, especially in the summer, is having these doors all the way wide open. Here we have it. Indoor, outdoor. This isn't California. I don't know what it is. The only problem is if my kids are having their class pool party here or something, it's very hard to keep wet kids out of the house. I have to really just stand guard and say, get away. I'll look over and there'll be two wet teenagers playing the piano. And I'm just like, okay, don't look, don't look. I'm so excited to show you my kitchen because since the day I moved in, this is the first time ever that the counter's been cleaned. Look, it's never going to look like this again. Please memorialize this. I love a wood kitchen. So the house really is like being inside a tree house. Here alone with my kids on a weekend, I cannot tell you how often I make something and I'm just feeding them as it comes off the stove because I'm not very good at things coming out of the oven or off the stove at the same time. So it is just like, have your vegetables, now have your this, now have your that. It's all out of order, but they don't seem to mind. So I knew when I imagined my favorite kitchen ever in my mind, that it would have an area dedicated to baking. It just makes it so much easier to have it all in one place and to know where your different flowers are and your chocolate chips. Chocolate chips are the most important thing in the whole house. And I could tell you where they are. All of my fireplace grates are done by Wallace Metalworks. Usually there's a dog sleeping under here. It just adds so much coziness. It's unbelievable how nice it is to have a little bit of fire going in your kitchen. This is the dining room. When I first moved to LA, I made friends with a photographer named Laura Porzak and she's turned into this incredible fine arts photographer. Clearly I'm a fan of her stuff because this is all Porzak. Brooke, Giannetti and I had a blast looking at light fixtures. I can never figure out dining room lights, but you know what? You live with the choices you make and I think I'm good with it. We really eat at home almost all the time and we eat in here pretty regularly and I put doors on this room so that it could be a meeting room and actually I have a lot of meetings in here. I work from home if I'm not on set. So the first room I described to Steve, I said I want a library that is a super awesome cozy up with everyone TV room and I want it to be like a deep gray blue. This is what he did and I think he kind of nailed it. When we were first envisioning the room, I said I know the couch I want but it's a BBDW couch and this is it and it's comfortable and I just like the look of it. It's just pretty. This is everyone's favorite place. You just don't need some huge old screening room. We're pretty happy just being right in here. Feet go anywhere. I am so not fussy. There are feet, there are dogs, there are shoes. If you're gonna build a house, you have to live in it. If we were gonna have a library, I wanted it to be still light so it opens all the way and then it can go straight out to the garden. Here's our fireplace and this is our clover because it's supposed to be good for the earth. It's so easy. We just threw down seeds and I just think it's cheerful. I have an owl box and I'm waiting for an owl to discover it. Come on. Look, my very first cherry ever. Oh my gosh. This is my little orchard. I love it so much. We have apricots, figs, and cherries right here and then we have peaches, nectarines, apples, and they are all fed by gray water because water is hard to come by in California and I don't want to use more than my share. So the gray water system, it's a big tank and it collects all the water from the washing machine, the dishwasher, and filters it and waters very specifically what you tell it to water. But there's a lot of phosphorus in gray water for some reason and I guess fruit trees thrive on it. So we just said, add more fruit trees. I love that you can come out here in the middle of the summer and find a snack. Growing up the daughter of a farmer and having such connections to my family farm, it just truly thrills me. So pretty much everything here is edible. All of the bushes are blueberry bushes and actually I'm gonna get you a blueberry. I see one. Here you go. You want to see my vegetable house? It's so cute. I'm all about herbs. Mostly I want thyme. I cannot grow enough. My kids and I love kale chips so we always have a lot of kale. It's tomato season, it's green bean season, and then just natural flowers that pests don't like because, you know, you got to be organic. This is my favorite spot to sit. Well, I have different favorite spots. I sit in this little house behind us in the morning with coffee. Here, I'll act it out for you. Isn't it so nice? And then if it's nighttime and I have friends over, I'll show you. This is where we like to be. We turn heaters on, fire, blankets, cozy. We do have a bird's nest in the passion fruit vine right here. Oh, it got torn up. Oh, R.I.P. Okay, let's go upstairs. This is the landing at the top of the stairs. We have here some fish. My kids for Mother's Day many years ago gave me an empty little fish tank, which was basically their way of saying, please go buy saltwater fish. But you can just sit and watch their personalities forever. Kids need a spot to study. You just need a place to spread out and do projects. So that is this table. This reading nook is maybe my favorite space in the house. You can peek in on the fish. It has all the kids' books. It has this awesome stained glass of a big old oak with three little owls and birdie looking up at them. And there was one magical night where exactly what I hoped for happened. And all three kids were piled in here with me. And we pulled down all the books from when they were little and we read them one after the other. That's really all I could hope for. All of us are readers. And if you're building your own house, you might as well offer people as many great places to read as possible. Welcome to my bedroom. This is T-Bear. My dad gave him to me when I was three from the Sears catalog. My mom made him some overalls. I knew I just wanted something that felt tight, compact. It was not a space that I needed a ton of room devoted to. Do you like it T-Bear? Yeah, T-Bear likes it. I love that I can open these doors at night and wake up to birds. So I didn't need a huge bedroom. I did want a large bathroom because so often we get ready for work at home and it's always, you know, in your own bathroom and you need space for everyone to be comfortable. I wanted my bathroom to be really neutral, really calming. We wanted a kind of white that was flattering to have light bounce off of. I also wanted the house to look like an old farmhouse next to an old barn. And this is obviously the barn part because you can see the barn window. So this is where I sit and they turn me from one old gal to another. This bathtub, I love being next to the window. I love the quiet. I love having a tree in my bathroom. I'm very lucky. This is like a dream come true room for me because I love to have kids over for a slumber party, but I'm also a stickler about sleep. Although sometimes there are kids literally everywhere. We wanted built-in bunks where kids could cozy up all in one together, which is usually what happens late at night. You'll see them all bent over something that they're looking at together. They're all in this bunk watching something on TV. I love that the beds all have their own, just like you're on a ship, a really nice ship. I love having a spot that is just where kids can be kids. I also keep all of their favorite, favorite toys from when they were really little. You want little kids who come over to feel welcome and excited. And every now and then the big kids will still pull out the old toys and play. You know, who doesn't want to put the money in the piggy bank? If you'd like me to ring up your groceries. Oh, that's where Banana Grahams is. We're big Harry Potter fans. And what are you going to do if you have a little cabinet under the stairs? You have to use it. So it became my son's office. Just a little spot for him to come in and dream. Mostly he hides from me and eats candy, but I can't blame him. I would do the same. I'm such a private person about my home. I'm in here. I've just taken you through the entire house. And really it's for a couple of reasons. I've never built anything all by myself before, and I'm so proud of it. I'm filled with gratitude every time I walk into my house that I get to live here, that I'm so lucky to have my kids here. So it's unlike me, and yet I'm so happy to have shared it with you. I loved hanging with you today. Bye. We started coming into contact with unbelievable plant material, and it was like Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark. You know, plants that you had dreamt about or only read about in books. It was like, you know, the craziest dream come true to be able to take care of some of these plants. It's a whole different world back here. My name is Carlos Campos Morera, and I am a landscape designer at Geoponica in Los Angeles. This is our private greenhouse slash plant orphanage. It's about a 2,000 square foot greenhouse that used to be a truck loading bay. The greenhouse sits in a very industrial part of Los Angeles where it's just literally factory building after factory building. Set back from one of those factory buildings is this greenhouse, which, you know, holds one of the rarest plant collections definitely in Los Angeles and maybe in the country. And it's totally hidden from the street. You would never see it if you were driving by. There's about 10,000 plants in here, probably more. It's so expensive to maintain. It's ridiculous. I mean, our accountant has like a meeting with us once a month and every single meeting brings up the question of why the **** do we have this space and how can we make it make money? I mean, and people who walk in here are like, so these are for sale? And we're like, no. Every century or so, plant collections change hands because that's sort of the lifespan of human beings. So about 15 years ago, we became the beneficiaries of a lot of plant collections that people had become too old to care for. A lot of these collections and plants would have just gone into the hands of people who didn't know how to take care of them and they would have died. We call it the non-human teachers, which is our non-profit orphans greenhouse. How many microclimates? It's like endless. I don't know. Thousands. As many plants as there are, there's microclimates. I mean, one plant growing over another plant creates a bit of shade and that's a microclimate. And one plant that's on two pieces of wood instead of one piece of wood, two pieces of wood collects more moisture than one piece of wood. You know, the shelving, the place in the greenhouse, its proximity to fans is just on and on and on and on and on. Here are some of our most poisonous plants, one of which is Euphorbia abdelkuri, which is from Abdelkuri Island, a small island off the coast of Somalia. You can no longer get to this island where it grows because the waters are infested with Somali pirates. Only a handful of botanists have been to that island to study this plant, one of which was our late friend, John Lavranos, who brought back two cuttings in the 70s. He got to the island by impersonating a British naval officer. And everything that you now see in existence comes from his original two cuttings. A friend of ours was propagating some of this plant in his greenhouse and got a small speck of it on his stomach. Said he was driving home and pulled up his shirt and there was like a giant black circle with a hole in the center on his stomach from where the sap had sprayed out. You look at the color of that sap and you're like, that will kill me. It's like the gnarliest neon alien green. And if you went to a hospital and you were like, oh, I got euphorbia abdelkuri sap on me. I mean, no one would know what to do. This cactus is, I'd say, the rarest plant in this greenhouse. And it's unimpressive at first glance, but I'd say it's priceless. Its habitat is about 10 by 10 feet in the middle of nowhere in Peru in a sand dune. The closest thing next to its habitat is a chicken farm. We had thought it was potentially this plant, but we couldn't ID it. There was no tag. There was nothing that came along with it. And one day, maybe two years later, after having the plant in the greenhouse, we turned around the original cutting of this plant and there was three chicken feathers stuck to it. So that's the way we ID'd it. Some people think there is no genetic diversity in this plant. It is a single individual that just produces offsets in habitat. So, ostensibly, it is the only one of its kind on earth. I've been stabbed by a cactus about 150,000 times. I have three in the back of my calf that have been there for probably 11 years now. At first, they'd send electric shocks up my leg. You can still feel them from the outside of the skin. But I've just become a part of me. This is one of the driest, second hottest areas in the greenhouse. Its natural orientation tended to be the one that was the hottest and the driest. So we're both creating microclimates inadvertently or on purpose and then responding to what actually just exists naturally here. These are two crazy plants. Welwitschia mirabellis. They're some of the oldest plants on earth. They can grow to be estimated 2,000 to 3,000 years old. They're from Namibia and they're from Angola. We're stacking old sewer pipes on top of each other to keep up with its root growth. In habitat, they have a tap root that goes down to a water table that nothing else can reach. To have a female in a collection is incredibly rare. They take 80 years or something to find out whether they're a male or a female. Most everyone that has one has a male. So about two years ago, we found out this was a female. Now we can start producing seed between these two. So Copiopoa come from potentially the driest desert on earth in Chile in the Atacama Desert. Parts of the Atacama Desert haven't received rain in like a million years. It's where NASA did most of its testing for Mars Rover because the habitat so closely emulates Mars. This individual could probably be somewhere between 250 and 300 years old. In habitat, it could be up to 500 years old. They are only watered by a coastal fog that comes into Chile from Antarctica, comes over the mountains, and blankets the desert for a few hours in a thick fog. And the fog lands on its spines and drips down to its root system. This is the hottest place in the greenhouse. It's a transitional space for plants that need the hottest temperatures at their growing times during the year. So we'll cycle things in and out of here. In the summer, it's insanely hot. It gets about 130 degrees. So it's like an insulated box inside of an already hot location. And so it's just a it's a ******* oven is basically what it is. These are all pachypodiums, which need incredible heat and hate the cold. I think that we probably lose like 20% of this collection every year. And it's not even that cold in LA. And so they're the happiest at 120, 130 degrees here during the summer. And this is just like a good spot to observe everything from above. I don't talk to the plants, but I don't look down on people who do to each their own, you know, I think the music that I play, they and they enjoy, they got their own thing going. I mean, if you come in here at like 11 o'clock at night, and the lights are off, like, the vibe is strong. I mean, it's it's palpable. There is never like a state of perfection. There's always this fluctuation of issues arising. But it it's a feeling of being outnumbered in a really great way. You know, there's there's only one of me and there's thousands and thousands of these other incredibly special beings that are beautiful and smart and interesting and come from all these crazy places. So it's an ego killer. Makes you feel small and lame. This is Sipostema jute, which is a large caddisiform succulent. So this is all water inside here. And these also grow in Africa. And they are part of the grape family, actually. And so they grow these giant blue leaves with the most unbelievably translucent pink grapes that suspend off the top of them. If you were stranded in a desert, you'd go and eat one of those grapes. But they actually are also a neurotoxin and horrifically poisonous. I feel like maybe some of these plants, because there are a lot of them are incredible survivors, somehow they've transmitted this desire to us of wanting to collect them and to propagate them and have them make seed and then make more of them to continue their species. But either way, we are the guardians of them. It's an incredible ******* bone crushing weight on your shoulders to keep all of them alive, to keep all of them happy. So these are Dioscoria elephantipes. And this is Dioscoria mexicana, which obviously illustrates Pangea in a wonderful way. This is from Mexico. This is from Africa. Ostensibly the same plant. These are aqueducts. They filter right into the plant's root system that only runs along the exterior of the plant. So it's a hyper efficient watering system that has very little waste. So it's catching the water and bringing the water directly to the root. All of these plants have been around for far longer than human beings have existed and some even before the dinosaurs. Some of these plants in here are the oldest plants on earth. This is like more tropical stuff and our infirmary. So it's got misters running all around it and the wood also holds moisture in a different way. These myrmecophytes are pretty amazing. This is a incredible sort of example of symbiosis. The interior of these plants are basically ant colonies. So all those holes are for where ants enter and exit and then the internal structure is just a crazy habitat for ants. This is a very, very rare cactus. This is Selenocereus wittyi, which Margaret Mee was an amazing illustrator and British botanist. Spent her life trying to see this plant flower. No terrestrial roots. It just grows on these grove of trees in Brazil that's habitually flooded. So they're suspended halfway up the trees in midair and only on the last trip to the Amazon she finally got to see it flower. It flowers once a year. We're outside of the main greenhouse now. This table is one of the brightest locations in the entire area and this is a bulb from South Africa. Maybe there's three people in the U.S. that have it. These flowers are probably only in effect for two days, maybe three days. I mean with all of the plants in here if you somehow miss its flowering that year you'll have to wait another year to pollinate it. So we keep a close eye on it. I mean to take it on was like the greatest, most exciting thing we ever experienced. It's a lot of different emotions. It's wonder. It's a diminutive feeling of I'm not the most important creature on earth and there's so many different life forms and they all have their unique sort of character and spirits and beauty and so to keep these things together and to keep them alive was and is an incredible gift. I mean it's my favorite space in the world.