With its view of the Hollywood sign and handsome brown facade, Annette Gutierrez’s 1908 house would read like a classic L.A. Craftsman if it were not for the chartreuse window trim, the first hint of her modern sensibilities.

Gutierrez jokingly calls herself an "exterior decorator" because she sees outdoor spaces just like interior spaces: rooms to be decorated. So beyond the blasts of chartreuse on the house she shares with husband Gustavo and daughter Lola in a historic part of Hollywood, the designer has found ways to make the landscape every bit as decorated a space as her living...

The giant yucca certainly lives up to its name: Yucca gigantea rises 30 feet high in ideal conditions, with white blossoms that push out from the center -- flor de izote, as the bloom is sometimes called, the national flower of El Salvador.

Many species of yucca produce edible flowers, but the giant yucca also is prized for its ornamental qualities. As the plant gets older, the base of the grayish trunk swells, taking on the primeval look of an elephant’s foot. The stalk that produces flowers will die back, but the plant will continue to send up new pups and side spears that will flower....

Sustainably minded Angelenos can head to Coldwater Canyon on Saturday and TreePeople’s Center for Community Forestry, where the environmental nonprofit is hosting workshops on rainwater harvesting, lawn replacement and tree planting.

For three decades, TreePeople has been training “citizen foresters” through its quarterly workshops. Like previous TreePeople workshops, this Saturday’s event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.

Although the lessons can be applied to greening a backyard, TreePeople’s goal is for participants to apply skills...

Xavier Veilhan, the Paris-based artist who last year turned Richard Neutra’s VDL House in Silver Lake into a startling temporary gallery and later transformed Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 21 into a ghostly, smoke-filled, one-night-only installation, took over John Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein residence Wednesday evening for the third installment of his “Architectones” series in L.A.

Veilhan showed four works, the centerpiece of which was “Rays,” a streamlined web of white cords strung over the pool, from roof to water’s edge. It was an homm...

Not a rock goes unturned in Greg Rubin and Lucy Warren’s new book, “The California Native Landscape: The Homeowner’s Design Guide to Restoring Its Beauty and Balance” ($34.95, Timber Press). The authors give us context for the renewed interest in native gardening, describing what our land looked like before Native Americans settled here. They take us through the changes that came with European farming practices and bring us to our present state of concrete, lawns and imported ornamentals. Rubin and Warren discuss our climate, environment and soils. They impress upon us...

That sound you hear is the past calling. And possibly the future.

An enterprising group of USC students, artists and community leaders in Leimert Park have been looking to a relic, the pay phone, as a portal to the neighborhood’s rich cultural history. The result was the Leimert Phone Co., a five-week design research lab led by USC professor Francois Bar, PhD candidates Benjamin Stokes and Karl Baumann, and Ben Caldwell, the owner of the local new media center Kaos Network.

Three teams looked at the obsolete technology of the pay phone to explore how aging infrastructure could be...

When Mark Fay heard that the F.P. Fay Building was about to be demolished, the “True Blood” sound engineer drove to downtown Los Angeles to see the building named for his great-grandfather. That day, Easter Sunday, he discovered the building had already been knocked down, with little left but some ironwork and Fay Building signage on a piece of marble.

Twenty-three years and one trip to the welder later, the silver F-A-Y lettering now hangs above a treasured turntable, standing out against a living room wall's matte black chalkboard paint. In the Eagle Rock home where Mark and...

Michelle Wong tried to hold back the tears after learning that her landlady had ripped out the goji berry planted in the backyard of her apartment in Koreatown. The shrub was head-high and starting to put out little purple and white flowers where the fruit would appear in summer.

“A lot of people try to grow it, but it’s not that easy,” she said, looking at the remains of the plant. She tried to pluck a few cuttings, in hopes of starting new plants in a place that was more protected.

The loss was particularly painful for Wong because she had been using her harvest in her...

Perhaps you recall the must-see-to-believe story of the Designer Dollhouse Showcase, for which top Los Angeles architects and interior decorators revealed the obsessive-compulsive gene that drives them to get every last detail just right, even if the project at hand is just 1:12 scale of reality?

Now comes word that at the charity auction where bidding on each designer dollhouse was expected to start at $15,000, "most" of the 10 houses did sell. Officials declined to specify which ones sold, or for how much, treating the auction results like some matter of national security. But a spokeswoman...