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"View Slideshow\n\nHad she not become an actress, Julianne Moore could definitely have been a decorator, and a successful one at that. Furniture, design, construction, renovation, and all manner of zhuzh\u2014these are her obsessions. She knows her Nakashima. She is a connoisseur and a surprisingly rigorous aesthete.\n\n\"Purple, black, gray, white, and green are the only colors I can handle,\" she says, proudly leading the way through the well-appointed 1905 New York City townhouse she shares with her husband, director Bart Freundlich, their two children, and a black Lab named Cherry. While there is little doubt she could give the decorators of the world a run for their money, her horticultural abilities remain somewhat in question\u2014at least in her opinion.\n\n\"I had several goes at the garden, and it was just a disaster,\" says the affable, distinctly un-Hollywood Moore, gesturing toward her 1,000-square-foot Greenwich Village backyard. \"It looked like a dog run. Tragic. Everything kept dying.\"\n\nBut salvation came when she was on a recent magazine photo shoot in a Manhattan apartment with outdoor space. \"I fell instantly in love with the terrace and asked who'd done it,\" she recalls. This is how Brian Sawyer, an architectural and interior designer who also masterminds gardens, entered her life.\n\n\"I told Brian, \u2018I want it to look like this,'\" says Moore, plunking down two hefty volumes dedicated to the hauntingly beautiful work of Belgian landscape designer Jacques Wirtz and his firm, Wirtz International. Responding to that rather ambitious mandate, Sawyer created a scheme that, without exactly incorporating the large-scale sculptural boxwood mounds that served as Moore's inspiration, has more than a whiff of Wirtzian unconventionality.\n\n\"Townhouse gardens are a total nightmare,\" says Sawyer, joining his client to reminisce about the two-month project. \"There are always drainage problems as well as huge planting limitations because of the lack of light.\" But not long before meeting Moore, the designer had spent a rainy vacation in Northern Ireland, where he found himself lurking about many \"hidden, moist gardens,\" as he describes them\u2014plots that were full of idiosyncrasies and short on sun. He decided to integrate this chic, moody vibe into the Moore-Freundlich project.\n\nView Slideshow1 / 8In the garden of her family's New York City townhouse, Julianne Moore sits on a low flagstone wall, amid plantings of loosely trimmed boxwood and ivy.\n\n\"The starting point was the pavers,\" Moore notes of the reclaimed bluestone on which she and Sawyer settled. \"Horribly expensive, but I am so glad Brian talked me into it, because the whole space now feels totally grounded.\" She recalls many happy, if obsessive, hours spent with Sawyer overseeing the placement of the pavers and complementary curbstones. \"I zipped back and forth from Baltimore, where I was shooting Game Change,\" says Moore, referring to the HBO drama in which she plays Sarah Palin.\n\nSawyer added a carefully edited selection of low-maintenance plants and trees in lush layers around the stonework. \"Green, green, green,\" he says. \"It's about ivy\u2014Boston ivy and English ivy\u2014and staghorn ferns and moss. And boxwood.\"\n\n\"I wanted that for a Wirtz moment,\" Moore interjects, \"and because it takes me back to hanging out at my grandparents' house as a kid.\" She points to a flowering tree looming over the shrubs in one corner. \"This specimen was already here,\" she says. \"It's a very old rose of Sharon.\" Competing with it in scale is a massive wood installation that resembles a beaver dam but is in fact a tree house/sculpture by artist Roderick Wolgamott Romero.\n\nAmong the verdant sweeps are a number of matte-black accents\u2014midcentury patio furniture by Russell Woodard, fiberglass planters, an ivy-friendly slatted fence with a Louise Nevelson feel\u2014that bring the space into sync with the charcoal-color trim of the fa\u00E7ade, not to mention its hip interior. One design detail presents a slight anomaly: a freestanding basketball hoop.\n\n\"At first I didn't think I would be able to cope with it, but there are two sporty guys in the house, and I quite like it now,\" Moore explains, surveying her property with obvious satisfaction. \"The hoop keeps things real, and it's black, so that makes it okay.\"\n\nAs if on cue, Cherry bounds over to bark at her mistress, who guides her to the canine comfort station at the garden's rear edge.\n\n\"She's black, too,\" states Moore. \"And she has a purple collar. See, I told you I was specific about color.\"\n\nClick here to tour Julianne Moore's garden."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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