The three-bedroom, three-bath house had fallen into serious disrepair, which was a good thing: It meant the couple could afford the asking price. “Dennis was like, ‘Woo-hoo! We can take care of that,’” Posey says, referring to the bay window in the living room, which, at the time, was sinking into the ground. Soon the home was theirs, and they commenced ripping out the wall-to-wall carpeting and peeling off three layers of floral wallpaper (five in the master bedroom). Their plan to delay major improvements held out until the shower pan in an upstairs bath broke, sending water through the downstairs ceiling; that repair snowballed into an overhaul of the entire house.
With the help of local home-remodeling company Top Hammer, Posey and Laird jacked up the entire structure to install new sill plates on top of the foundation (the old ones had rotted through). Then they tore out and replaced dry-rotted walls surrounding the west-facing windows; excised the pink and black tiles from the upstairs bathroom; and obliterated the kitchen, with its 1970s-era scallop-edged wood cabinets, curling brown-and-cream linoleum, and green-and-gold appliances.
Beyond the French doors, afternoon rays ricochet off the surface of a saltwater soaking pool.
Before continuing the tour upstairs—where the three bedrooms have exchanged their old wallpaper for coats of warm blue and brown paint, and the two bathrooms have received fresh tile and fixtures—we pass through a back gate into Posey and Laird’s driveway. A path leads into the side yard, where beds are beginning to overflow with tomatoes, basil, arugula, chiles, Vietnamese herbs (Posey was born in Vietnam and still cooks his mother’s recipes), and a row of space-saving columnar apple trees. “We’ll get enough apples for a pie this year,” Posey says, delicately fingering one of the stalks. An avid cook, Posey likes to invite small groups of friends over for dinner every Monday—there were nine guests last week—and meals are often made from fresh produce plucked straight from the garden.
Sometimes that produce might include pomegranates, pink lemons, or pawpaw fruits, all of which are among the exotic edibles that grow in Posey and Laird’s terraced front yard. In the five years they’ve lived here, Posey has saturated the slope with new plants while keeping the original switchbacking concrete path, and most of the rock walls that edge the terraces, intact. Over time, different sections of the hill have gained distinct identities—at the base of the incline, for example, Posey planted hardy olive trees and lavender bushes that blow in the wind, as if waving at passers-by. But everywhere, heterogeneous plants freely intermingle: fruit trees, flowers, and trees and shrubs often chosen for their blue-tinged foliage.
We idle in the garden, and Posey and Laird express a sense of contentment at having found—and created—this hillside idyll. “I put my heart and soul into everything I do, so it was hard to let go of the old house,” Laird admits. “But after six months of working on this place, finally it was our house.” Posey concurs. “Every morning when I run down those stairs,” he says, gesturing inside, “I’m just as excited as I was the first time we saw this place.”
Published: August 2008
