Inside Stunning Homes That Embrace Nature

[tranquil music]

My favorite architectural scene in all movies

is when Dorothy opens the door,

and outside the door it's color from black and white.

And that quite possibly is the first time

most people had ever seen color film in their life.

[tranquil music continues]

The right sort of buildup to something really beautiful,

I call it choreography.

The best way to experience architecture

is by moving through it and scanning and looking around.

And so if you realize that,

then you can make the architecture amplify the place.

I'm Jim Cutler, principal designer

at Cutler Anderson Architects,

and I designed this place about 10 years ago.

[gentle bright music]

I got a call, like we always do,

from potential clients,

and they had already chosen a piece of land,

and it was a hilltop,

and it was a really beautiful spot.

But I needed to remind them that it's very easy

to bring cars into places,

but it's really hard to get them out.

We were coming down from that hilltop,

and I noticed a visual clearing in the woods,

and I said, What's that over there?

They said, Oh, it's an old logging pond.

You know, it's all filled in.

And I walked around,

there's this wonderful tree stump outside here,

and I said, You know,

if I was gonna design something for you,

I'd design something here,

and I would integrate the building

and the pond as one thing.

Then they asked me why.

And I explained to them,

at that point in my career,

I had become very averse to killing anything,

any living thing.

I mean, the world is just so beautiful,

and everything has the same right to be here,

whether it's inanimate or a plant or a creature.

For many years, I felt that fostering life,

creating habitat, is a high calling in life.

And, you know, water fosters life,

and I could somehow integrate a pond and a building.

If we build it, they will come,

put it that way.

And one time I was out here with Michael,

one half of the owners,

and he's very in touch with the living world.

So we were sitting out here in the evening,

he said, You know, in about 10 minutes

the flickers are gonna come by

and they're gonna start eating the insects off the pond.

10 minutes, the flickers come by.

And then the swallows are gonna come by.

The swallows come in.

It's getting a little dark,

I think the bats are gonna come in.

Bats come in.

This place had connected him to the rhythms

of life that water fosters.

Power of architecture is emotional.

When you choose a place that you're going to dwell in,

then there's an obligation to know that place well,

because there's life.

[birds and insects chirping]

We're coming up the walk to the house,

and we deliberately parked guests far away.

And we designed it in a way to make

it actually quite narrow.

And you can see that you sense the clearing

just by the amount of sky you can see beyond these trees.

But to reinforce what happens when you walk

in the front door,

that you open up to the pond,

we even tighten the path up further.

And then as you come on the house,

you know there's something special

on the other side of that door.

And we wanted to give some implication

you were gonna get there,

but the door then acts as the foil.

[gentle music]

I'm squeezing you because the tighter it is,

the bigger big feels;

the lighter it is,

the darker dark is.

By contrast, they amplify one another.

But I don't wanna be like boo,

you know, to surprise you when you walk in the door.

So I wanted to bring a little bit of the pond on that side,

and I wanted you to see over the roof

so you could sense the clearing on this side

and create a level of anticipation of arriving somewhere.

[tranquil music]

These are steel beams holding this up.

The reason for steel beams

is we thought we'd have a lot of view.

If I had to do this in wood,

they would've been much thicker and deeper,

and we would've blocked view.

So then you have to start using materials

within their nature.

Once you get going on a design,

and if you're lucky and if you're listening,

it tells you what it wants.

It's this sort of cacophony of different voices for me.

The steel wants to show what it can do.

The wood wants to show what it can do.

You know, the forest wants to show its history

and its nature.

The water wants to show how it fosters life.

How do you take all that cacophony of voices

and turn it into a harmony?

That's my job.

[gentle music]

The owners wanted a strong a connection

of the pond as possible.

So when we designed this,

I had a lotta fun.

Kind of see this right here?

It's about a 400-pound piece of lead,

and there's one on either side.

It counterweight this door.

Let's see if it'll open.

[gentle music continues]

Now, that's an 800-pound door.

And that wasn't so hard to lift,

because now you can see the lead's all the way down here.

And that is a heavy piece of lead.

And so we have three of them,

one at the kitchen,

one at the living room,

and one in the bedroom.

So that when you're in the building,

you don't necessarily need to be in the building;

you can be in the pond.

Oh, another frog.

Nope, two frogs. Look at them.

You gotta have a place to dive off.

You don't wanna splash water back on the oak floor.

And, you know, it just seemed like such a poetic spot

to sit [indistinct].

You can take it all in,

all the sounds, all the animals, everything.

And to some degree, you can take in the silence.

[soft tranquil music]

It's a nice kitchen.

We'd wanted to have a window there.

And it was also the best possible place for the range.

It was a fun thing to design,

and it works, shockingly.

Now, the fireplace is the lateral stability.

We're in a sizable earthquake zone.

And if you do a roof like this,

where you can see all the way from one end to the other,

that's a lot of load up high.

So that if an earthquake wants to move

the building sideways,

well, it's gonna do it.

And the only way to restrain that lateral movement

is with some degree of mass or a structural stability

in this axis.

So the fireplace is a structural element,

and it's, for me, a statement about the lateral forces

that are endemic to this region.

[soft tranquil music continues]

I'd say 95% of the building was from this region, you know,

and it's reflective of this region.

Glulam beams were invented here.

Vertical grain for plywood was invented here and comes here

because it's the only place Douglas fir grows,

and it's light.

So it's well suited for structure.

Cedar, which the outside of the building is made of,

red cedar, which is from here,

'cause it's highly aerated,

and it's a very light, physically light wood,

and it's extremely rot-resistant.

So we're using it within its nature.

We're using the Douglas fir within its nature.

So you'll notice there are little bits

of concrete out on the corners here,

and they all line up.

So when you look at the site plan of this,

it looks like an ancient giant swimming pool

that has been partly, let's say,

subsumed by detritus and sediments.

But still, there's a vestige of that swimming pool.

I look back on it now, I think,

That's a little bit of a foo-foo metaphor,

but I wanted to create a sense of time.

And by leaving objects in the landscape,

it pushes the time reference from the project.

[gentle music]

The bedroom is pretty much all the same.

In a sense, the one thing I would say

is it is glass between living room and bedroom

because we wanted the roof,

which is the sheltering element,

to be one continuous plane.

It would be apparent to make this feel more like a pavilion.

You know, when you think of a pavilion,

you think of an outdoor area under a roof.

My God, that cat has a regal pose, you see?

[Jim laughs]

I like the needle. He's a good one.

[gentle music]

And you have to walk outside to get to the guest house.

And I'll tell you,

I built a little cabin for my daughter and myself.

She actually helped build it when she was 11.

And it's a wonderful thing.

And it's only about 35 feet

from the front door of our house.

And there is not one night that goes by

when I'm running back and forth and look out at the water

or listen to the wind in the trees

or look at the moon or what planets are coming by.

And I had no hesitation making that separation,

where you gotta walk outside

to get to another room in the house.

When you go from this one to that one,

you experience the outside.

You hear the water, you see the water,

and if it's windy, you hear the trees.

If it's snowing or raining,

you hear the water coming down in the pond.

Why not experience the place fully?

I mean, it's really a joy.

[gentle music continues]

I talked about architecture being shelter.

We could take that and say it's clothing, right?

Keeps you warm and dry.

So if you're clothing the institution of family,

you better know its anatomy.

I mean, you're wearing a sweatshirt right now,

and might be from Gap for all I know,

but one size kinda fits all.

It's got sleeves and a hole for your head and,

you know, a piece for your trunk.

But in a way, that's no different than this house

or the institution of family

that you're gonna clothe,

because families have very specific qualities.

There are public zones,

like the room we're in,

and there are private zones,

like the bedrooms.

And there are decision points,

like entries, where you get to make a decision

whether you wanna participate on something in public

or you wanna go to your private zone.

And they don't wanna mix.

They want to have as much separation as possible.

And in small houses, that's tricky.

But that's the anatomy you're trying to clothe.

The only difference between me and the Gap

is you can think of me more

as a Savile Row, you know, tailor.

I tailor things.

[soft music]

When you bring someone to an emotional understanding

of things, of something that's beautiful,

they learn to love it.

And teaching people to love the living world is actually,

I think, the highest quality that any human being

could have, because we're killing this place.

I want to describe a method of working

that is different than the mainstream.

And I'm hoping that I hit a few lucky souls

that get it and move in that direction.

[soft tranquil music]

Hi, AD, I'm Dakota.

Welcome to my house.

[bright upbeat music]

I moved here about five years ago,

and it was the second house I looked at,

and the first house I ever bought.

I love wood, and I love light and windows and green,

so I just fell in love.

Ryan Murphy lived in this house first,

and he loved it so much too.

But his family got bigger,

so he moved out.

[chuckles] Lucky.

And this is the living room.

I hang out in here. I read.

People kind of are always coming in and out of my house,

and everyone hangs out in this room, obviously,

not only because it's a living room,

but because it's like one of the only places to sit.

The furniture is vintage,

and the couches were original and we recovered them

in this amazing crushed mohair.

And this table came with the house.

I bought it with the house, which was lucky.

It's pretty cool.

On the bottom, it's bamboo.

The piano is vintage;

it's an antique Wurlitzer.

I play, like, badly.

Hi.

That's Zeppelin.

He wants to show you his dinosaur.

This is not an antique, this thing,

but I have a record collection that goes all the way,

and I just alphabetized them,

and it's really exciting.

Right now is Ram, Paul McCartney.

It's a really great album

and a really great album to listen to on vinyl.

And this amazing thing happens at certain times of day,

like really early in the morning, 7:00 a.m.

Light from the sun on the pool does this on the ceiling,

and I think it's the coolest.

[jaunty music]

This is my office.

I read scripts in here.

I have meetings in here, sometimes.

I actually don't really get any work done

'cause I get distracted by everything that's in here.

My favorite thing about it, I guess,

is these bookshelves that I built into the walls.

Originally, they were just these really beautiful,

like, clean wood slabs,

and then they started to fall because I have a lotta books.

These ones were sent to me by Patti Smith.

I said, I love your poetry so much.

I love your work.

And so she wrote me little notes

in all of these books that she sent me.

This is a weird pile.

Don't focus on this pile of books. [chuckles]

Let's just put these ones in a different...

We'll just put them down here.

Go to a cooler pile.

This is cool. It's a wax mushroom.

This, I was working with Chanel a long time ago,

and my alias was Punk Rock,

and I thought that was funny.

They're silly awards.

I don't even know.

I'm not an awards person.

Barb is such a great character.

Barb didn't come back in season two, did she?

They totally forgot about Barb in the Upside Down.

That sucks. She's still there.

Oh, Sex and the Constitution,

that's a really interesting one.

Sex, religion, and law from America's Origins. [laughs]

Oh, Jesus, what a weird girl.

This was a Polaroid of Hunter Thompson,

who was my dad's best friend and a very dear,

like, godfather figure to me.

And I love it so much.

Even with his boobies.

This is an amazing photographer named Alice Mann,

and she photographs these marching band girls

in South Africa, and the energy is amazing,

and it makes me feel hopeful.

That is a photograph of my grandma

at her house at Shambala with one of her tigers.

[upbeat music]

Let's go in the dining room.

This table, actually, we designed it and had it made.

I mean, it's a smaller room,

and we didn't wanna lose the rug and the light,

and we kinda wanted the table to disappear.

And these chairs look like little humans.

They're so gorgeous.

This I found on 1stDibs, maybe.

I [beep] love 1stDibs so much.

I have some crystals, yeah.

This one is cool because it has a dandelion inside.

Isn't that so cool?

People tend to give crystals as gifts in L.A.,

and that's great, I love them.

There's a really big one over there in the corner.

That guy, that crystal is crazy.

And it projects good vibes into,

you know, a house and at people.

[bright music]

This is my little kitchen.

We painted it.

We painted it this green color.

I love green.

I lived in New York before I moved into this house,

and then before I moved to New York,

I lived in a house, and I painted the kitchen green,

but I totally [beep] up the color,

and it was, like, the most atrocious color green.

It was so hardcore.

It looked insane, like, terrible.

But then I got it right on this one, I think. [laughs]

I love cooking.

I cook a lot, and I bake a lot.

I love limes. [chuckles]

I love them. They're great.

I love them so much,

and I like to present them like this in my house.

And how cool is this?

It's dying, that plant,

now that I'm looking at it.

That's so sad.

There we go.

I never, ever thought that I'd be, like,

a dish person, because I don't get it at all.

Like, the psychology of it,

I don't understand why anyone would collect loads of dishes.

Or people who have china in, like, china cabinets.

I was always like, What?

Why? I don't get it.

But this is so cool.

Here I am with loads of dishes.

Look at these.

Never have I used this.

What is that for?

Oh, it's for teacups. Got it.

I mean, can you stand it?

They're the coolest. [chuckles]

Wouldn't you wanna drink outta that?

I never do, 'cause they're too cool.

They're just for sitting in this cabinet.

My company is called TeaTime Pictures,

so tea is a big deal for me,

but also caffeine is a big deal for me,

which I need some of it now.

[bright music]

That's upstairs where my bedroom is,

but we're not going up there.

This is outside.

I wanted you to see this table and chairs over here

because this was made out of the wood

from Winston Churchill's yacht.

I'm not lying.

And I think that's the coolest thing ever.

And look at how these chairs fit.

Nobody can really sit in this table

because the chairs wobble in these cracks

in the slabs of pavement,

and people fall out of them, and it sucks.

But isn't that so satisfying and amazing?

I planted this tree when I moved in,

and it was a little baby,

and I got some whoppers of lemons on that one.

But this one, look,

they're like perfectly placed oranges on this tree.

Can you believe that?

How beautifully they're placed?

It's like I did it for this very reason.

This was meant to be an herb garden,

and I never planted any herbs in it,

and I'm just looking at it now,

and it looks so crazy in here. [laughs]

I didn't ever do anything,

and all this wild [beep] started growing in it.

Like this guy.

What are you even?

Weeds.

You know that on a lot of tea bags

they have little fortunes on the back of the tea tab,

and I really take them very seriously.

And one that I get all the time is,

The difference between a flower and a weed is judgment.

So think about that.

[upbeat music]

I finally recently got outdoor furniture.

For a while, it was looking pretty grim out here.

This is like an amazing little double chair situation

that I love, it's one piece.

I thought it would be really, really pretty

if there were some flowers and things out here,

'cause this house can tend to feel really masculine.

These chairs are not meant to be put outside.

They're very delicate and expensive,

but they look so good out here, so who cares?

My cat Chicken is buried here, which is not funny,

but I don't know why I think it's funny to tell you that.

The pool's heated a little so I can go in it all the time.

And also, it doesn't really get cold here.

Let's go up here.

These are some stairs that lead you to this place up here,

which is a hot tub,

which is so cold. [laughs]

Bamboo grows so crazy fast.

I don't know if you know that.

And my neighbors on that side are in a war with me

about how high the bamboo in the driveway is growing,

which is insane,

because why would I want people

to be able to see in my house?

I can't believe that I'm even letting you guys in my house,

so they can just shove it.

This is this gorgeous,

just randomly placed flower arrangement.

And that's my bedroom. Sneaky.

Yeah, let's go back downstairs now.

Zeppelin.

Oh, [beep] don't.

What are you gonna do?

Go get it.

That one's probably lost forever.

[bright upbeat music]

Thank you so much for coming, AD.

I hope you liked the tour of my house,

but I really would like for you to leave now,

so beat it.

AD, hello.

Come on in,

it's the cleanest it'll ever be.

[upbeat music]

So this is the biggest room in the house.

It's the living room,

and I wanted it to feel really expansive,

so somebody could be playing Rummikub over there.

That's really the Rummikub table.

And people could be sitting around the fire here.

You know how you just imagine it,

and then someday you have a perfect moment

where it actually comes true?

That is like a [lips smack] kinda moment.

Steve and Brooke Giannetti and I have worked together

for a long time,

and I sat down with them one time and said,

Okay, I know exactly the house I wanna build.

And I described it to 'em.

Steve sent me a watercolor of it,

and that is exactly the house we built.

We so didn't change much that I started panicking

in the middle of the build

and I thought, I never even made a Pinterest board.

I never even showed him pictures from a magazine.

I just told him what I wanted,

and he did it.

And what if I hate it? [laughs]

But it turns out I'm really, really happy.

The paintings are both by Rainer Andreesen.

This is Victor Garber's husband.

And in that one,

there's a little photograph of Victor

and me painted into the painting,

and so it's extra special dear to me.

This is by Reed Bradley at Judson Studios.

He is the son of a friend of mine, Marla Frazee.

She's my favorite children's book author.

I wanted it to be evocative of spring and West Virginia.

And you see like the morning glories coming down

and a little bit of the mountains in the distance.

A special feature, especially in the summer,

is having these doors all the way wide open.

Here we have it, indoor, outdoor.

If this isn't California, I don't know what is.

The only problem is,

if my kids are having their class pool party here

or something, it's very hard to keep wet kids

out of the house.

I have to really just stand guard and say, Get away!

I'll look over, and there'll be two wet teenagers

playing the piano, and I'm just like,

Aah, okay, don't look, don't look.

[upbeat music]

I'm so excited to show you my kitchen because,

since the day I moved in,

this is the first time ever that the counter's been clean.

Look, it's never gonna look like this again.

Please, memorialize this.

I love a wood kitchen.

So the house really is like being inside a treehouse.

Here, alone with my kids on a weekend,

I cannot tell you how often I make something

and I'm just feeding them as it comes off the stove,

'cause I'm not very good at things coming out of the oven

or off the stove at the same time.

So it is just like,

Have your vegetables,

now have your this, now have your that.

It's all outta order,

but they don't seem to mind.

So I knew when I imagine my favorite kitchen ever

in my mind that it would have an area dedicated to baking.

It just makes it so much easier to have it all in one place

and to know where your different flours are

and your chocolate chips.

Chocolate chips are the most important thing

in the whole house,

and I could tell you where they are.

All my fireplace grates are done by the Wallace Metal Works.

Usually there's a dog sleeping under here.

It just adds so much coziness.

It's unbelievable how nice it is

to have a little bit of fire going in your kitchen.

This is the dining room.

When I first moved to L.A.,

I made friends with a photographer,

her name's named Lara Porzak,

and she's turned into this

incredible fine arts photographer.

Clearly, I'm a fan of her stuff,

because this is all Porzak.

Brooke Giannetti and I had a blast

looking at light fixtures.

I can never figure out dining room lights.

But you know what, you live with the choices you make,

and I think I'm good with it.

We really eat at home almost all the time,

and we eat in here pretty regularly.

And I put doors on this room

so that it could be a meeting room.

And actually, I have a lot of meetings in here.

I work from home if I'm not on set.

So the first room I described to Steve,

I said, I want a library that is a super awesome,

cozy up-with-everyone TV room,

and I want it to be like a deep gray-blue.

This is what he did,

and I think he kinda nailed it.

When we were first envisioning the room,

I said, I know the couch I want,

but it's a BBDW couch,

and this is it, and it's comfortable,

and I just like the look of it.

It's just pretty.

This is everyone's favorite place.

You just don't need some huge old screening room.

We're pretty happy just being right in here.

Feet go anywhere.

I am so not fussy.

There are feet, there are dogs,

there are shoes.

If you're gonna build a house,

you have to live in it.

If we were gonna have a library,

I wanted it to be still light,

so it opens all the way,

and then it can go straight out to the garden.

Here's our fireplace.

And this is our clover,

because it's supposed to be good for the earth.

It's so easy, we just threw down seeds,

and I just think it's cheerful.

I have an owl box,

and I'm waiting for an owl to discover it.

Come on.

[upbeat music]

Look, my very first cherry ever.

Oh my gosh!

This is my little orchard.

I love it so much.

We have apricots, figs,

and cherries right here.

And then we have peaches, nectarines, apples,

and they are all fed by gray water,

because water is hard to come by in California,

and I don't wanna use more than my share.

So the gray water system, it's a big tank,

and it collects all the water from the washing machine,

the dishwasher, and filters it,

and waters very specifically what you tell it to water.

But there's a lot of phosphorus

in gray water for some reason,

and I guess fruit trees thrive on it.

So we just said, Add more fruit trees.

I love that you can come out here

in the middle of the summer and find a snack.

Growing up the daughter of a farmer

and having such connections to my family farm,

it just truly thrills me,

so pretty much everything here is edible.

All of the bushes are blueberry bushes.

And actually, I'm gonna get you a blueberry, I see one.

Here you go.

You wanna see my vegetable house?

It's so cute.

[upbeat music]

I'm all about herbs.

Mostly I want thyme.

I cannot grow enough.

My kids and I love kale chips,

so we always have a lotta kale.

It's tomato season, it's green bean season.

And then just natural flowers that pests don't like,

'cause, you know, you gotta be organic.

This is my favorite spot to sit.

Well, I have different favorite spots.

I sit in this little house behind us

in the morning with coffee.

Here, I'll act it out for you.

Isn't it so nice?

And then, if it's nighttime and I have friends over,

I'll show you.

This is where we like to be.

We turn heaters on, fire, blankets, cozy.

We do have a bird's nest

in the passion fruit vine right here.

Oh, it got torn up.

Oh, R.I.P.

Okay, let's go upstairs.

[upbeat music]

This is the landing at the top of the stairs.

We have here some fish.

My kids, for Mother's Day many years ago,

gave me an empty little fish tank,

which was basically their way of saying,

Please go buy saltwater fish.

But you can just sit and watch their personalities forever.

Kids need a spot to study.

You just need a place to spread out and do projects.

So that is this table.

[upbeat music]

This reading nook is maybe my favorite space in the house.

You can peek in on the fish.

It has all the kids' books.

It has this awesome stained glass

of a big old oak with three little owls

and Birdie looking up at them.

And there was one magical night

where exactly what I hoped for happened,

and all three kids were piled in here with me,

and we pulled down all the books from when they were little,

and we read them one after the other.

That's really all I could hope for.

All of us are readers,

and if you're building your own house,

you might as well offer people

as many great places to read as possible.

[upbeat music]

Welcome to my bedroom.

This is T Bear.

My dad gave him to me when I was three,

from the Sears catalog.

My mom made him some overalls.

I knew I just wanted something that felt tight, compact.

It was not a space that I needed a ton of room devoted to.

Do you like it, T Bear?

Yeah. T Bear likes it.

I love that I can open these doors at night

and wake up to birds.

So I didn't need a huge bedroom.

I did want a large bathroom

because so often we get ready for work at home,

and it's always, you know, in your own bathroom,

and you need space for everyone to be comfortable.

I wanted my bathroom to be really neutral, really calming.

We wanted a kind of white that was flattering

to have light bounce off of.

I also wanted the house to look like

an old farmhouse next to an old barn.

And this is obviously the barn part,

'cause you can see the barn window.

So this is where I sit,

and they turn me from one old gal to another. [laughs]

This bathtub.

I love being next to the window.

I love the quiet.

I love having a tree in my bathroom.

I'm very lucky.

[upbeat music]

This is like a dream-come-true room for me,

because I love to have kids over for a slumber party,

but I'm also a stickler about sleep.

Although, sometimes there are kids literally everywhere.

We wanted built-in bunks where kids

could cozy up all in one together,

which is usually what happens.

Late at night, you'll see them all bent over

something that they're looking at together.

They're all in this bunk watching something on TV.

I love that the beds all have their own...

Just like you're on a ship,

a really nice ship.

I love having a spot that is just where kids can be kids.

I also keep all of their favorite,

favorite toys from when they were really little.

You want little kids who come over

to feel welcome and excited,

and every now and then the big kids

will still pull out the old toys and play.

You know, who doesn't wanna put the money in the piggy bank?

If you'd like me to ring up your groceries?

Oh, that's where Bananagrams is.

[upbeat music]

We're big Harry Potter fans.

And what are you gonna do

if you have a little cabinet under the stairs?

You have to use it.

So it became my son's office.

Just a little spot for him to come in and dream.

Mostly, he hides from me and eats candy,

but I can't blame him,

I would do the same.

[upbeat music]

I'm such a private person about my home,

and here I've just taken you through the entire house,

and really it's for a couple of reasons.

I've never built anything all by myself before,

and I'm so proud of it.

I am filled with gratitude every time I walk into my house,

that I get to live here,

that I'm so lucky to have my kids here.

So it's unlike me,

and yet I'm so happy to have shared it with you.

[upbeat music]

I loved hanging with you today.

Bye, AD.

[bright upbeat music]

[fan whooshing]

[door whirring and creaking]

[bright upbeat music]

We started coming into contact

with unbelievable plant material

and it was like Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

You know, plants that you had dreamt about

or only read about in books.

It was like, you know,

the craziest dream come true to be able

to take care of some of these plants.

It's a whole different world back here.

My name's Carlos Campos Morera,

and I am a landscape designer at Geoponika in Los Angeles.

This is our private greenhouse/plant orphanage.

It's about a 2,000 square foot greenhouse

that used to be a truck loading bay.

The greenhouse sits in a very industrial part

of Los Angeles where it's just literally factory building

after factory building.

Set back from one of those factory buildings

is this greenhouse, which, you know,

holds one of the rarest plant collections

definitely in Los Angeles and maybe in the country.

And it's totally hidden from the street.

You would never see it if you were driving by.

There's about 10,000 plants in here, probably more.

It's so expensive to maintain, it's ridiculous.

I mean, our accountant has like a meeting

with us once a month and every single meeting brings up

the question of why the fuck do we have this space

and how can we make it make money.

I mean, and people who walk in here are like,

So, these are for sale?

And we're like, No.

Every century or so,

plant collections change hands

because that's sort of the lifespan of human beings.

So about 15 years ago,

we became the beneficiaries of a lot of plant collections

that people had become too old to care for.

A lot of these collections and plants

would've just gone into the hands of people

who didn't know how to take care of them,

and they would've died.

We call it the Nonhuman Teachers,

which is our non-profit orphans greenhouse.

How many microclimates?

It's like endless.

I don't know. Thousands?

As many plants as there are, there's microclimates.

I mean one plant growing over another plant

creates a bit of shade,

and that's a microclimate.

And one plant that's on two pieces of wood

instead of one piece of wood,

two pieces of wood collects more moisture

than one piece of wood.

You know, the shelving,

the place in the greenhouse,

its proximity to fans.

It's just on and on and on and on and on.

Here is some of our most poisonous plants,

one of which is euphorbia abdelkuri,

which is from Abdelkuri Island,

a small island off the coast of Somalia.

You can no longer get to this island where it grows

because the waters are infested with Somalia pirates.

Only a handful of botanists have been

to that island to study this plant,

one of which was our late friend, John Lavranos,

who brought back two cuttings in the '70s.

He got to the island by impersonating

a British naval officer.

And everything that you now see in existence

comes from his original two cuttings.

A friend of ours was propagating

some of this plant in his greenhouse

and got a small speck of it on his stomach.

Said he was driving home and pulled up his shirt

and there was like a giant black circle

with a hole in the center

on his stomach from where the sap had sprayed out.

You look at the color of that sap and you're like,

That will kill me.

It's like the gnarliest neon alien green.

And if you went to a hospital and you're like,

Oh, I got euphorbia abdelkuri sap on me.

I mean, no one would know what to do.

This cactus is, I'd say the rarest plant in this greenhouse,

and it's unimpressive at first glance,

but I'd say it's priceless.

Its habitat is about 10 by 10 feet

in the middle of nowhere in Peru in a sand dune.

The closest thing next to its habitat is a chicken farm.

We had thought it was potentially this plant,

but we couldn't ID it.

There was no tag.

There was nothing that came along with it.

And one day, maybe two years later,

after having the plant in the greenhouse,

we turned around the original cutting of this plant

and there was three chicken feathers stuck to it.

So that's the way we ID'd it.

Some people think that it is,

there is no genetic diversity in this plant.

It is a single individual

that just produces offsets in habitat.

So obstensively, it is the only one of its kind on Earth.

I've been stabbed by a cactus about 150,000 times.

I have three in the back of my calf

that have been there for probably 11 years now.

At first, they'd send like electric shocks up my leg.

You can still feel 'em from the outside of the skin,

but I've just like, it's just become a part of me.

This is one of the driest,

second hottest areas in the greenhouse.

It's natural orientation tended to be the one

that was the hottest and the driest.

So we're both creating microclimates inadvertently

or on purpose, and then responding

to what actually just exists naturally here.

These are two crazy plants.

Welwitschia mirabilis, they're some

of the oldest plants on Earth.

They can grow to be estimated two to 3,000 years old.

They're from Namibia and they're from Angola.

We're stacking old sewer pipes on top of each other

to keep up with its root growth because, in habitat,

they have a taproot that goes down to a water table

that nothing else can reach.

And to have a female in a collection is incredibly rare.

You know, they take 80 years or something

to find out whether they're a male or a female,

and most everyone that has one has a male.

So about two years ago,

we found out this was a female,

and so now we can start producing seed between these two.

[upbeat music]

So copiapoa come from potentially the driest desert

on Earth in Chile, in the Atacama Desert.

Parts of the Atacama Desert haven't received rain

in like a million years.

It's where NASA did most of its testing for Mars Rover

because the habitat so closely emulates Mars.

This individual could probably be somewhere

between 250 and 300 years old.

In habitat, it could be up to 500 years old.

They are only watered by a coastal fog

that comes into Chile from Antarctica,

comes over the mountains,

and blankets the desert for a few hours in a thick fog.

And the fog lands on its spines

and drips down to its root system.

This is the hottest place in the greenhouse.

It's a transitional space for our plants

that need the hottest temperatures

at their growing times during the year.

So we'll cycle things in and out of here.

In the summer, it's insanely hot.

It gets about 130 degrees,

so it's like an insulated box

inside of an already hot location.

And so just, it's a fucking oven,

is basically what it is.

These are all pachypodiums which need incredible heat

and hate the cold.

I think that we probably lose like 20%

of this collection every year,

and it's not even that cold in LA.

And so they're the happiest at 120,

130 degrees here during the summer.

And this is just like a good spot

to observe everything from above.

[gentle music]

I don't talk to the plants,

but I don't look down on people who do.

to each their own, you know?

But I think the music that I play, they enjoy.

They got their own thing going.

I mean, if you come in here at like 11 o'clock at night

and the lights are off,

like the vibe is strong.

I mean it's palpable.

There is never like a state of perfection.

There's always this fluctuation of issues arising.

But it's this feeling of being outnumbered

in a really great way.

You know, there's only one of me

and there's thousands and thousands

of these other incredibly special beings

that are beautiful and smart and interesting

and come from all these crazy places.

So it's an ego killer.

It makes you feel small and lame.

[gentle music continues]

This is cyphostemma juttae,

which is a large caudiciform succulent.

So this is all water inside here,

and then these also grow in Africa

and they are part of the grape family actually.

And so they grow these giant blue leaves

with the most unbelievably translucent pink grapes

that suspend off the top of them.

If you were stranded in a desert,

you'd go and eat one of those grapes,

but they actually are also a neurotoxin

and horrifically poisonous.

I feel like maybe some of these plants,

because a lot of them are incredible survivors,

somehow they've transmitted this desire to us

of wanting to collect them and to propagate them

and have them make seed and then make more of them

to continue their species.

But either way,

we are the guardians of them.

It's an incredible fucking bone-crushing weight

on your shoulders to keep all of them alive,

to keep all of them happy.

[soft upbeat music]

So these are dioscorea elephantipes

and this is dioscorea mexicana,

which obviously illustrates Pangaea in a wonderful way.

This is from Mexico.

This is from Africa.

Extensively the same plant.

These are aqueducts.

They filter right into the plant's root system

that only runs along the exterior of the plant.

So it's a hyper-efficient watering system

that has very little waste.

So it's catching the water

and bringing the water directly to the root.

All of these plants have been around

for far longer than human beings have existed,

and some even before the dinosaurs.

Some of these plants in here are the oldest plants on Earth.

This is like more tropical stuff and our infirmary.

So it's got misters running all around it,

and the wood also holds moisture in a different way.

These myrmecophytes are pretty amazing.

This is a incredible sort of example of symbiosis.

The interior of these plants are basically ant colonies.

So all those holes are for where ants enter and exit,

and then the internal structure

is just a crazy habitat for ants.

This is a very, very rare cactus.

This is selenicereus wittii,

which Margaret Mee was an amazing illustrator

and British botanist, spent her life trying

to see this plant flower.

No terrestrial roots.

It just grows on these grove of trees in Brazil

that's habitually flooded.

So they're suspended halfway up the trees in midair.

And only on the last trip to the Amazon,

she finally got to see it flower.

It flowers once a year.

We're outside of the main greenhouse.

Now, this table is one of the brightest locations

in the entire area.

And this is a bulb from South Africa, bulbine alveolata.

Maybe there's three people in the US that have it.

These flowers are probably only in effect

for two days, maybe three days.

I mean, with all of the plants in here,

if you somehow miss its flowering,

that year you'll have to wait another year to pollinate it.

So we keep a close eye on it.

I mean, to take it on was like the greatest,

most exciting thing we ever experienced.

It's a lot of different emotions.

It's wonder.

It's a diminutive feeling of I'm not

the most important creature on Earth

and there's so many different life forms

and they all have their unique sort of character

and spirits and beauty.

And so to keep these things together

and to keep them alive was and is an incredible gift.

I mean, it's my favorite space in the world.

[bright upbeat music]