Healdsburg couple constructs Steampunk-style stargazing tower

Far from the city lights of Santa Rosa, or even Healdsburg, the Dry Creek Valley can get very dark at night. Lisa Malloy said it's so dark she can easily see The Milky Way from her stargazing tower, a weathered metal edifice tucked at the edge of a field of tall feathery grass and agave.

“We wanted a stargazing dynamic because we just love to look at the stars,” said Malloy, who moved to the property nearly three years ago from Palo Alto. At the time, there was an unfinished house and a lot of empty space and dirt.

But it would take the mind of an artist and slightly mad landscaper like Jake Moss to create such a unique tower and set it in a landscape with an almost dreamlike quality to it. He did it not with new construction but a repurposed rusty water tower that looks like it has been standing in that spot for 100 years. Moss scavenged the ancient bit of farm equipment and gave it a custom and cool Steam Punk treatment. Now the Malloys can ascend the outside stairs and take their seats at the top for a bird's eye view of the night sky, a view so fine they feel no need to use a telescope.

“I love going around and finding things that have a story behind them,” said Moss, who is known for his creative problem-solving and inventive reuse of salvaged materials. For several years he performed backyard wizardry, often along with brother Joel, as host of his own DIY network show, “Yardcore,” as well as with appearances on other shows from “Yard Crashers” to “Turf War” on DIY and HGTV.

As a designer herself, Lisa Malloy said she was drawn to Moss' aesthetic and his uncanny ability to use reclaimed materials in striking, unique and playful ways.

Much of the acre and a half that Moss had to work with is set aside as the Malloys' septic field. Moss had the idea of turning it into a meadow of tall ornamental grass, punctuated here and there by an occasional agave and smoke tree. He selected Lomandra, a tufted, perennial that looks like a grass but is in fact, in the asparagus family, and grows in clumps to about 3 feet tall. It's the new “darling” of the horticultural trade, according to Emerisa Gardens, a Santa Rosa nursery that carries the native Australian plant.

“You're kind of limited to doing nothing or grass,” Moss said. “It's just a nice open swatch of texture and it's evergreen. That's one of the reasons I wanted to use it. And it's a very hardy plant. If you're going to plant 300 or 400 of them you want to make sure it's really hardy.”

Through the sea of grass he built a long and wide boardwalk. Set within the middle of that is a sunken fire pit that puts you deep within the grassland.

“The cool thing about this is, when you're sitting in here you're grounded to the landscape around you,” Moss said. “It puts you into a different perspective.

Malloy said they have packed as many as 25 people around the flame at night for stargazing parties.

Moss loves nothing more than to score weathered old pieces of building and architectural salvage and dream up new uses. Within the Malloy yard, he used massive old crane mat timbers that were used in creating the tunnels for BART. These massive boards were used to create surfaces on which to transport heavy machinery over mud and unstable surfaces.

“They have character. They have holes where the nuts and bolts used to go through. They have an interesting story and have kind of a cool, beat-up look to them,” Moss said with obvious enthusiasm.

These timbers show up in different iterations throughout the yard, from a pergola that runs along one side of the landscape to a series of “floating benches” with concealed legs that show up in various parts of the landscape.

Lisa Malloy wanted a landscape that held surprises. Moss began right at the entrance beside the house. Visitors first come upon a private little courtyard set along a curved copper wall, surrounded by fragrant star jasmine, with “secret corridors” as Moss puts it - openings that just provide a hint of the magic beyond. A wall of water falls serenely down the middle.

“This is a very windy zone,” Malloy said. “We wanted a little protection, and then to create something interesting beyond.”

The landscape is full of surprises. The pergola, a series of timbered arbors, provides a great space for outdoor dining, long enough for a massive table that can accommodate a large number of friends and families.

“It's such a fun visual to have a great big long table,” Malloy said.

Tucked into a niche between the pergola and the grassland is an outdoor shower - perfect for people and the couple's Newfoundland. Moss carefully selected massive lava boulders to fashion a natural wall that project the feeling of being out in nature under a waterfall in some southwest canyon.

Moss said he learned his craft - and his art - from his father. He was a contractor, but also an artist, who attended the California College of the Arts in the 1960s, a time of great artistic experimentation.

“My dad exposed me to art so I already had that crazy art bug in me. I was really brought up appreciating modern art and I got to meet a lot of cool people and celebrities,” he said.

He began working with his father on contracting jobs when he was just a young kid and continued for years. He wanted to pursue art but it seemed impractical.

“I never put together the connection between art and landscape installation,” he said. “It was just a job.”

And then he had an epiphany, a realization that he could incorporate art into inventive landscapes with features that made bold statements. Around the same time he began thinking of how fun it might be to get into television or entertaining, another creative interest.

“I just had this passion to be creative and share that with people. Everything just happened at once.”

Alerted by a friend he answered an ad for a call for landscape designers who would be interested in doing a TV show. Moss, with his artistic background and boundless enthusiasm, was a natural for the job. He took easily to it and did TV for a number of years, finding himself at times doing crazy things he wouldn't necessarily boast about now.

“They wanted me to experiment and we started really experimenting and really being crazy because that's what they wanted me to do. Some of the stuff was so out there that even now I cringe and go ‘My God.' But it was a proving ground. It really allowed me to experiment and helped me hone my skills.”

But Moss eventually tired of the tricks. Some tasks were just impossible to do well, because of too-small budgets and too little time. He eventually walked away from TV.

That ability to pull off a job quickly, however, came in handy three years ago when a 900-square-foot display garden that he installed in two days won top honors at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show. His team includes brother Joel and his wife, Brandi.

Moss found a new use for some metal panels that had been part of a water feature in that award-winning landscape. He used them to create beautiful doors with laser-cut designs he sketched out himself that now lead to a vegetable garden for the Malloys. He also built Cor-ten planters, repeating the rusty metal theme of the stargazing tower that is the clear focal point of the space.

For the tower he created a new door and incorporated a look that had been salvaged from Alcatraz. He cut the bottom of the tank and then used that to fashion a round 15-foot swiveling door that leads from the tower area to another secret garden - a pond complete with lotuses and other aquatic plants and fed by a steady stream of water through what looks like a miner's sluice box.

This is John Malloy's special place, which conjures up memories of times spent in Thailand, his wife said. Moss brought in massive boulders, some as heavy as 10,000 pounds, to place around the water garden.

“He gets in there and tends it,” Lisa Malloy said. “We have frogs and toads like you can't believe. It's so much fun.”