Entertainment
They Traded a Garden for a House That Would Nurture Them
A couple lived in a three-story house on a double lot in Portland, Ore. But they wanted a smaller house on one level, so they built it right next door.
A few years ago, Karen Ford, a landscape architect, committed an act that one might imagine would be traumatic for a member of her profession: She killed her garden.
The doomed Eden had covered one side of the double lot in northeast Portland, Ore., where she and her husband, John Dingler, lived in a Craftsman house. “It was a thriving, interesting garden that I inherited and embellished over 20 years,” said Ms. Ford, 76.
But the couple, whose five adult sons were scattered from Los Angeles to Savannah, Ga., felt it was time to downsize from the three-story 1909 Sears kit house to a home with no stairs. (They had to walk 30 of them just to do laundry.) After caring for her own older parents, Ms. Ford asked herself: “What do we really need? And how can we take all these things into consideration and still have a place that looks beautiful and is functional for anybody at any age?”
A condo in downtown Portland wasn’t an option for Mr. Dingler, 80, a coastal oceanographer. “It just didn’t feel right to me,” he said. Besides, they liked their neighborhood, the Alberta Arts District.
So in 2022, the couple divided the lot, sold the Craftsman, and uprooted the garden to make way for a 1,256-square-foot, three-bedroom house on one level. Now, Ms. Ford can look over the border to her old digs, but she’s not looking back. “As a landscape architect, that’s something that I’ve had to learn to do with my projects,” she said. “You just walk away.”
