Moving In With Mother Nature : Push-Button Rain, Patio Sofas Help People Turn Homes Inside Out

You’re eager to go camping, but previous obligations have sentenced you to stay in town. If you’re of the classi L.L. Bean persuasion, you can always pitch a pup tent in the back yard.

But if armchair camping is more your style, you might do as some trendsetters in Los Angeles do and move your sofa, Persian rug and crystal chandelier outside.

No time to chill out by a mountain waterfall this summer? A small but growing number of stuck-in-the-city types are installing man-made falls in their gardens and yards--if not in their living rooms--complete with environmentally correct recirculating water, of course.

Even those who ache to commune with coral reefs and neon-colored fish have alternatives that fit inside the tiniest studio apartments. Designer aquarium stores will custom-build a fish sanctuary into virtually any piece of furniture or sell you a ready-made coffee-table aquarium.

Increasingly, people are moving the outdoors in--or the indoors out.

Is this a response to high-tech burnout? Are Couch Potatoes finally becoming part of the Earth Patrol? Have city dwellers become so divorced from earth, air, water and fire that they’re going to extremes to get back in touch with the basic forces of nature?

Although answering the call of the wild within the signal range of a cellular phone may strike seasoned backpackers as the equivalent of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken around a campfire, those who have embraced the trend say it’s at least a start.

At the heart of the phenomenon is the idea is that if you haven’t got the time or money to get away from it all, you can at least counteract it all.

To start, you can enliven the artificial kingdom you call home with a jungle of air-purifying houseplants. Perhaps create a Zen rock-and-sand garden in a corner of your laundry room. Or, if you’re a die-hard workaholic, put a miniature fountain on top of your desk.

Some folks are even opting for hillside “horizon pools� (in which water cascades down the side of a swimming pool, usually looking out on the horizon or a view). Or windows that trickle electronically induced “rainfall� at the push of a button.

Although many of the naturalizing elements are pricey, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get back to basics. For less than $10, consumers can buy a tropical plant, a stove-top indoor barbecue grill or an audiocassette of ocean waves peacefully breaking on a balmy beach. Who says there’s no such thing as the endless summer?

Or the eternal Boy Scout. Six months ago, Joseph Turner, the managing director of TreePeople, wanted to capture the feeling of camping out at night. So he tented the bedroom of his Venice home in canvas except for its bay of louvered windows, which he leaves open at night. Turner, who is also a garden designer, says he was motivated by the “whole idea of getting back to being a Boy Scout.�

The phenomenon of bringing the indoors out and the outdoors in, say the experts, has been increasing throughout the country for roughly the last five years, with Southern California leading the way.

But now, the idea seems to be reaching critical mass. Indeed, for many, the takeout version of nature has become as close as the local shopping mall, where stores carrying live or dried flowers, exotic rocks, indoor fountains and unusual aquariums are proliferating.

Nobody seems to know just how far the transformation will go, but nearly everybody who has noticed the change has a theory on why it’s happening. Consider:

* The Lost Youth Factor: Some people are trying to relive their youth, when life seemed simpler and they spent more time outdoors.

* The Spiritual Factor: Nature is almost universally thought to be healing and capable of bringing a spiritual, stress-relieving presence into one’s habitat.

* The Design Factor: The aesthetic of nature is coming back in style.

“We’re leading such frenzied, stressful lives that we’re looking for something to slow ourselves down--without using drugs or alcohol,� says Priscilla Wrubel, founder of The Nature Company, the nation’s largest chain specializing in nature-oriented gifts and accessories.

“More and more people are building sanctuaries in their homes and gardens. They’re putting things in their homes that remind them of the experiences they had outdoors.�

Nature Company stores sell chunks of nature (rocks, for instance), tools with which to observe nature (telescopes and binoculars) and items that recall or re-create nature (posters, books).

The chain’s expansion in recent years seems to parallel consumer interest in all things natural. The business started with one store in Berkeley in 1973. By 1985, it had a dozen outlets. Today, in addition to a thriving catalogue operation, The Nature Company operates 57 stores.

In addition to the Lost Youth Factor, New York trend forecaster Faith Popcorn associates the indoor/outdoor phenomenon with other lifestyle patterns:

She points to a trend she calls “fantasy adventure� in which people feel as if they’re living more adventurously by, say, going to amusement parks, eating blue corn chips or camping out in the back yard. Of course, Popcorn says, “the risk-taking is risk free.�

She also believes the indoor/outdoor movement is related to “cashing out�--working less (or not at all) in hopes of gaining freedom and restoring naturalness.

“I think this is something that L.A. has always known about, because the climate’s made it feasible,� says Marian McEvoy, editor-in-chief of New York City-based Elle Decor magazine.

“In other parts of the world, this was either considered impossible or not chic. Now it’s hip for everybody because things that have to do with natural phenomena are more attractive. The old notion of pretentious layer-on-layer of luxe just doesn’t appeal. . . . People are starting to realize that the stuff God made looks better than what people have done. It’s beautifully designed. How can you top it?�

McEvoy finds it “wonderful to see this occurring even on the East Coast, where people have had nine layers of curtains and double-paned windows. They did everything they could to lock the inside in and the outside out. A lot of people don’t have curtains now because they want to see more of nature.�

According to Betty Goodwin, who, along with Paddy Calistro, is writing a coffee-table book about Los Angeles houses: “There’s been a blurring of the lines between the indoors and outdoors� throughout the 20th Century in Los Angeles.

She and Calistro point to the pioneering contributions of architects such as Charles and Henry Greene (whose homes often had sleeping porches off the bedrooms) and Frank Lloyd Wright (whose famed Hollyhock House in Barnsdall Park has a body of water running from an outside garden into the living room, where it forms a moat around the fireplace).

“One of the most dramatic things you see happening right now is that people are using their outdoor spaces as living spaces,� says Calistro.

Adds Goodwin, “And old, rusted, tacky garden furniture is being used indoors, in living rooms and around fine, wooden dining-room tables.�

One man frequently associated with this idea is artist Jay Griffith, a much-sought-after landscape designer who’s recently started doing interiors as well.

In 1984, Los Angeles-born Griffith decided to hang a crystal chandelier in the front yard of his sumptuously landscaped Venice home. Recently, he persuaded several clients to do the same, and photos of their outdoor rooms have turned up in national publications.

Richard Rothstein, a writer/producer of television movies, recently had Griffith create an outdoor room, complete with an American Indian carpet and chandelier, for the Hancock Park home he shares with his wife, psychoanalyst Bushra Rothstein.

“Instead of your lawn being a place that you just kind of walk over every now and then, what Jay does is maximize the use of your land,� he says. “He turns it into something that instead of weeding with it, you actually use it, live with it.�

Griffith so likes living outdoors that he planned to build a bedroom in a magnolia tree in his front yard. However, a pruning error eliminated that possibility. Instead, Griffith designed the master bedroom after “a Huey, Dewey and Louie treehouse� he remembered from Donald Duck comics--making it intentionally cramped, with lots of window space.

Downstairs in his living room, stylish, unrusted patio furniture from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘50s surrounds a kidney-shaped coffee table made of stone.

Griffith thinks the interest in rethinking indoor and outdoor traditions may be a reaction to high technology.

“I think people are bored with high-tech, and they’re aware that we’ve also pushed nature to the brink (of destruction),� he says.

Brian Murphy, the Santa Monica-based architectural designer, is celebrated for jarring juxtapositions of natural and man-made materials. And although he is constantly reinventing his style, one of Murphy’s commercial clients dubbed it “tropical-industrial.�

For a residential project, Murphy planted 100 square feet of banana trees that were two stories high--in a patch of earth inside the home.

He has created awnings made of thatched eucalyptus branches, an outdoor patio table from a bale of hay (which sprouted when it rained), a garage door made of palm fronds and wall sconces fashioned from grass skirts. He insists he didn’t set out to bring more nature into anyone’s life; the designs simply evolved from the situations with which he was presented.

Whether nature is integrated in homes consciously or serendipitously, it is definitely capturing the attention of design mavens.

“Everyone wants a fireplace in their bathrooms now,� reports Paige Rense, editor-in-chief of Los Angeles-based Architectural Digest.

“I recently saw a house in which someone had a room with an interior floor of grass. People are creating their own streams and creeks with recirculating water.

“I think it’s part of a larger trend: Everybody sort of wants to be out of the big city. Everybody wants to be out in nature or in small towns and villages. But it’s not possible for most of us to do that. So we find other ways. For instance, I think there’s going to be a real movement toward tents.

“I want to put a tent under my sycamore trees and sleep in it and read in it on summer nights. I don’t have the time or the courage to go out into the wilderness, but I can sleep out in my own back yard.�

George Rand is a psychologist and UCLA professor of architecture who advises individuals and couples about how to create psychologically satisfying home environments.

“We all need the calming presence of a spiritual force in our homes,� he says, adding that such a presence can be represented in a variety of ways, “from a religious shrine to a small, quiet window seat designed to catch intense summer sunlight at a certain time of morning.�

But Rand cautions that nature may or may not serve that purpose: “It’s not that the leaves or the flowing water intrinsically contain some spiritual power. The same presence can be found in a ray of light or a geometric form--if it has that quality for an individual. But whatever it is, people need that healing quality in their environments. It’s just easier to look to nature for it.�