Los Angeles has just seen more than a week of torrential weather, and Molly Sedlacek is explaining how the designer of her Highland Park home had been in touch to see how things were holding up. It’s late February, and the mountains are capped with snow, but otherwise the city has returned to itself: bright and sunny. We’re sitting around the kitchen island as Molly’s two-year-old golden doodle, Bear, bounces around our feet. The trifold door leading out to the patio is hung with sheers that float in the breeze. Smoke from an incense stick curls out a window that frames the branches of a cork tree.

“I was like, Yeah, everything’s good,” Molly says she told the designer. No leaks, no damage to report. But there were some updates. Walking around the house, she points out a patch of stucco on the garage turned work space, where water ran down the redwood fencing, leaving behind a streak of ruddy tannins. “Some people would totally freak out,” says Molly. “But I like that sort of thing.”

More than most, Molly, formerly a Bay Area–based landscape designer with her own company, ORCA, is keenly interested in the mark of time. Her work, which includes several backyards in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood and, more recently, a ceramicist’s home in Ojai (featured in Dwell’s November/December 2022 issue), relies on aging processes for character: A steel fireplace becomes flecked with oranges and reds after exposure to moisture; plantings fill out corners between decking that silvers from sun. For Molly and her work, age is beauty and beauty is a process.

With jobs ramping up in Southern California, Molly was looking for a live/work situation in L.A., and her ability to envision things in the future came in handy when she found a residence for sale designed and built by Michael Tessler of Responsive Homes. With a flat roof and set atop a garage, the home has a narrow, two-level plan—just 860 square feet—that made it the odd one out in a neighborhood of low-slung gables. The facade was covered in brown cork panels. The front yard and rear patio, sparsely landscaped, didn’t offer privacy from North Figueroa Street or the house to the rear. It was perfect.

“I almost felt like I was a part of the team that built it and was the last person to come in and occupy it and do the garden,” Molly says. “It was like Michael had understood what I would have requested. It felt very built for my lifestyle.”

Now known as Fig, Molly’s home is the second experiment by Tessler (his home was the first) in creating a sustainable vernacular for Los Angeles. Terrazzo countertops in the kitchen, bathrooms, and garage are made with sediment from the Los Angeles River. The flooring, trim, and casework, all in local fast-growing shamel ash, are from Angel City Lumber. Tessler used clay plaster everywhere inside except for the wet areas, which received tadelakt plaster, and avoided paint. “That’s part of my obsessiveness over biodegradable materials,” he says.

“I wanted the materials to drive the design. How do you simplify the building envelope and the palette in order to make the house local?”
—Michael Tessler, developer

The facade’s ThermaCork panels, made of renewable materials from Portugal’s cork oak forests in the Alentejo region, are the only element that traveled a distance. “It’s the only agroforestry product I know of that, just by the nature of someone buying it, involves the industry saving and stewarding these trees because only the oldest trees produce the best quality cork,” Tessler says, “and even though they’re shipped across the world, they’re still basically carbon neutral, because it’s the bark of the tree. It’s sequestered onto the house. And the cork regrows and induces the tree to sequester more carbon.”

After Molly got the keys to the house in the spring of 2022, she and her partner, Ryan Scott, gave it their personal touch, adding shelving in the kitchen to display dishware and decor—“It made it feel more like a home,” says Molly—and, upstairs, a bed frame and an open bookcase that lend shape to what was an open room.

The most impressive changes, unsurprisingly, surround the home. “I think what it really needed was life around it. It felt like it kind of landed on a hillside, so my whole goal was to create a boundary and then layer in some softness,” says Molly. Horizontal redwood fencing now encloses the yard along the street and the back patio off the kitchen. Molly filled the gap between the fence and the patio, which she refinished in rough-cut clay bricks by ORCA, with moody plantings that include bay laurel, Ebbing’s silverberry (a nod to Molly’s home state of Oregon and her mom, also a landscape designer), willow wattle, and Japanese honeysuckle. A potted elephant tree that lived inside up north now sits outside, “living its best life,” says Molly.

For seating, the couple brought back Angel City Lumber to carve fallen coast live oak trees into massive benches that are stacked in an L-shape flanking the entry stairs and facing back toward the kitchen. Those were designed by Ryan. “We specced these pieces with bark on,” says Molly. “The wane on the wood makes changes more tangible. You get to watch it fall off and see how it weathers and celebrate that. That’s really neat.”

“I always think gardens are never done.”
—Molly Sedlacek, landscape designer and resident

The blend of woods Molly chose for the yards is meant to mirror the home’s cork finish, which will gain a similar patina. “It ages like wood, but it almost gets this extra level of character to it with the spottiness of the fleck,” she says, holding up an extra panel she pulled out of her samples library in the downstairs studio space.

Around the corner from the studio, the cork oak that was visible from the small window in the kitchen reveals itself in full. (Molly guesses its age as 80, and Tessler says it’s the largest he’s seen in the city.) It provides a foil from busy North Figueroa Street, as do the redwood fence, thriving plants like the bay laurel, which Molly says will grow to 18 feet, and beloved objects designed and found. The first thing she put here, even before the fence, was a block of Ubatuba granite with a raked texture. At one end of the yard are more benches by Angel City Lumber, again in an L shape, that give form to the space. There is also a stack of whale bones, given to Molly by a friend, which she likes to rearrange from time to time.

But one of Molly’s favorite additions to the yard is a felt-leaf kalanchoe bush. “My hope is that it lives alongside the cork oak and they grow together,” she says. “Putting it here feels symbolic of what was here and what is now for the land.”

We head back to the patio, where Bear comes over to greet us. “Bear, are you made of wood?” asks Molly, scratching behind his ears as he chews on a toy. The dog walks alongside us, and we take a seat on the oak benches, which match his silvered-out black hair. “He started out more black,” she says, adding that this made him less desirable than the rest of his litter. Who knows if Molly knew he’d take on a “patina.” Even if she didn’t, she sees something that others don’t: the possibility of what something can become.

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Utopiad and Michael Tessler, Responsive Homes / @responsivehomes

Landscape Design: Molly Sedlacek, ORCA / @orcaliving

Builder: Corey Ruppert, Salt Mine

Cabinetry Design & Installation: Angel City Lumber / @angelcitylumber and Murray’s Woodworks

Plaster Walls: Scott Nelson, Naturalwalls / @plastertexturecolor

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