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"View Slideshow\n\nWith his tattoos, black leather regalia, dark sunglasses, and fleet of Harleys, architect and designer Peter Marino cuts a dramatic swath through the blue-blazered design world. But that biker persona is somewhat deceiving. The New Yorker behind a global array of inventively swank, high-impact boutiques for Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Loewe, and other luxury brands has a soft\u2014dare one say romantic\u2014side, hidden away in the Hamptons, where his weekend home's modest white gates open to a dozen lush, enchanting acres of horticultural heaven.\n\nCreamy \u2018New Dawn' roses fling their canes over a parade of classic arches, and wisteria blankets a cupola-topped motorcycle shed. A quartet of amethyst-color rhododendrons effloresce around a venerable stone fountain that Marino found on a business trip to Bordeaux, France. Across the rear of the house, more than a thousand pink hydrangeas bloom in a frothy profusion at odds with the architect's menacing tattoos.\n\nThe revelation of this dreamy landscape, Marino says in mock horror, \"will ruin my reputation!\" Joking aside, the seemingly endless gardens are as uncompromisingly detailed as any project under his direction. \"Anal-retentive doesn't begin to describe me,\" he says, adding, \"If a hedge has a leaf out of place, the veins on my neck swell.\" The trees in the apple orchard may look irregularly spaced, as if they sprouted from Johnny Appleseed's scattered pips\u2014yet that apparent happenstance, Marino wryly observes, \"is about as natural as Marie Antoinette.\" He helped position every one of the fruit trees, noting with a broad grin, \"I drive a mean tractor.\"\n\nBack in the mid-1990s, when the architect purchased the property, an indifferent landscape met the eye, one crisscrossed by dog runs and chain-link fences. \"It had a prison aesthetic,\" Marino recalls. At its heart was a poorly renovated '20s dwelling that grandly sat at the end of a long drive shaded by mature red maples. Too grandly, in fact, for its new owner; he bulldozed it and built anew.\n\n\"We don't live at Tara,\" says the architect, who is married to costume designer and historian Jane Trapnell Marino. The replacement home is deliberately off axis, so visitors coming up the drive see only the towering maples and bronze sheep sculptures by Fran\u00E7ois-Xavier Lalanne standing like sentinels (38 works by the French artist and his wife, Claude, dot the grounds) before ending up in a large courtyard. Just to one side, the white-painted residence shyly comes into view through a scrim of greenery. Its appealing asymmetry melds Dutch Colonial, Arts and Crafts, and McKim, Mead &amp;amp; White inspirations into a Yankee hybrid that needed a complementary setting.\n\n\"American landscaping, like American architecture, is its own thing,\" Marino asserts. \"A combination of formal and informal.\" Hence the pert Colonial Revival\u2013style parterres close to the house. Farther out are mounds of red and pink azaleas so opulent that they evoke Henry Francis du Pont's Azalea Woods at Winterthur; those florid shrubs, in turn, dissolve as they make contact with the dense grove that marks the property's perimeter. To maximize privacy, the architect beefed up the lot lines with Leyland cypress, cryptomeria, and arborvitae, around 500 trees in all. More than 50 percent of the species here are evergreen. As Marino explains with an eloquent growl, \"I really hate leafless trees in winter\u2014they crush your soul.\"\n\nThe gardens are laid out like a color wheel: purple flowers to the north of the house, red to the east, pink to the south, and multihued in the west-facing rose garden. A skillful blending of early-, mid-, and late-blooming varieties keeps the palettes flourishing for much of the year. Yellow flowers, however, are quarantined in a distant spot, because \"mixed with any other color than green they look cheap,\" Marino says firmly. \"Gardening is like decorating. It's all about placement.\"\n\nIt's also about knowing when to add a splash of vulgarity, to paraphrase Diana Vreeland. In Marino's world that means a cutting garden teeming with gladiola, a once-fashionable plant that is about as welcome today as slugs. \"Nobody grows them because people don't want to be accused of having bad taste,\" Marino says. \"So I have acres of them.\" Touch\u00E9: Tough-guy cred reestablished.\n\nTour the beautifully curated Hamptons gardens of AD100 architect Peter Marino."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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