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August 2005 People
Avant Gardener After reaching for the stars with his first startup, Chris Hougie, MBA ’76, set his sights for his next venture on the ground, literally. His former company, Great Explorations, helped make glow-in-the-dark stars a mainstay in children’s bedrooms across America. He had started an earlier incarnation of the company straight out of business school with about $10,000 and was doing well selling educationally oriented games and toys to specialty retailers. A call from Wal-Mart’s buyer changed all of that and sent his company’s sales into orbit. When he sold the company in 1995 to University Games’ Bob Moog, MBA ’84, Hougie gave considerable thought to his next venture. A visit to the Chaumont Garden Festival—an avant-garde gardening/landscaping showcase in France—during his honeymoon in 1996 stuck with him. A few years later he decided to bring a variation of the festival to Northern California. After three years of careful planning turned into five, and nearly 5,000 cubic yards of soil was moved, Cornerstone Festival of Gardens opened south of the town of Sonoma in July 2004. “Building the gardens was one of the easier parts,” Hougie said. “It was getting everything else situated that took so much time.” Once the zoning, planning, and other legal hurdles were squared away, he gave up to $20,000 for construction of each of the gardens—which are up to 2,200 square feet in size. Contemporary landscapers got creative. One covered an ailing pine tree with sky-blue plastic balls—a leafless tree à la Dr. Seuss. Another fastened together scores of nylon mats on a series of small mounds to emulate the surrounding rolling hills. A handful of trees set in a gravel area bordered by a painted wall and billowing sheets of nylon occupy one of the gardens. “Normally gardens are hard to see because they are so private,” Hougie says. “Hopefully these gardens and their diverse, whimsical designs will stimulate people’s creativity.” To that effect, Cornerstone Gardens isn’t just a showcase for landscape experiments. The 9.5-acre site also has a nursery, several galleries, a design and architectural salvage company, and a cafe. The buildings and their surroundings carry the same serendipitous, daring approach as the gardens. Garden admission fees will help fund rotating plot designs, Hougie says. “I’d like people not to be constrained by what’s available at the Home Depot and Orchard Supply stores,” he adds. “Architecture is too big of an investment to take major risks with, but the garden and its affordable elements give one a lot more power to be experimental.” —ARTHUR PATTERSON |
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ARTHUR PATTERSON
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