FEATURES

WITHIN A BRIEF TWO-MONTH TIME FRAME, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT ED HOLLANDER REVITALIZES AN EAST HAMPTON PROPERTY JUST IN TIME FOR A WEDDING

At the end of May in 2005, Ed Hollander said "I do" when asked to oversee the exterior design of a four-acre oceanfront property in East Hampton. First, however, he had to sign a prenuptial agreement of sorts. Since the homeowners were getting married in late July, Hollander promised to create a new Eden—in two months—where the marriage ceremony would occur.

Imagine it as cinema. On the soundtrack, the first notes of Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" sound forth and then, almost immediately, begin to speed up. Dum-dum-tee-dum! Time-elapse photography synchronizes to an ever-accelerating tempo, showing a mass of carpenters and masons frantically building a new driveway, tennis court, pergola, pool terraces, wooden decking, bluestone pathways and a serpentine boardwalk to the beach. Teams of gardeners prune trees and plant wisteria and hydrangea.

Concluding this madcap montage is a shot of the newlyweds framed against a panoramic view of the ocean on a cloudless, sunny day. Hollander raises a glass of Champagne to toast them while wiping a single drop of sweat from his brow.

"Everything looks completely natural now, but it was a gigantic undertaking done in a very short period of time," the husband says. "Ed can command an army, yet he never loses his attention to detail."

"It was lots and lots of work to make it look like we did nothing," Hollander says. By this, he means that his clients wanted not only to transform the landscape, but to preserve its exquisitely rare environment.