EVEN THOUGH Paul Repetowski was the garden designer on the project, he's happy to acknowledge that when his client's house was redesigned, it was from the inside out.

Most big, old city houses like Henry Vigil and Katherine Remijan's have little connection with the outdoors. The concept that we live in a garden all the time, a house just when we go indoors, wasn't a force in early-20th-century architecture. Houses on small urban lots usually dominated the property like fortresses, and the most you could hope for was a distant view of water or mountaintops. So opening up the house to create connection with the garden was a focus of the remodel designed by John Fleming and Andrew Borges of the Seattle architecture firm of Rohleder Borges Fleming.

The entire back of the old house was punched out, and solid walls replaced with white-paned windows and generously scaled glass doors. Because of the more intimate connection between interior and exterior, Repetowski kept the garden simple, serene and green. He took into account views to the garden every bit as much as he considered plant choice and space for outdoor entertaining. The architects provided as large a view out as possible, and Repetowski made sure there was something pleasing to see most days of the year. From a pop of pink Chinese tree peony to a blaze of autumn maple, eye-catching scenes abound.

Downstairs, the essence of seasonal change is sheltered within concrete light wells. Repetowski describes the original basement as a dark, uninviting space. Lowering the floor a foot to get some head space made it feel like a real room, and a new wine cellar, steam room and sauna make the downstairs a destination.

Outside the windows, displayed at eye level in the light wells, is a perfection of tiny trees. The bonsai collection is selected, trained and cared for by expert Tom Knoblauch. Looking more like ornaments than living plants, each little pine, larch and katsura cycles through the seasons.

Repetowski considers the garden, with its Asian feel and attention to detail, as a larger version of the bonsai. A few stone steps down from the sidewalk is a sunken courtyard, shielded by a hedge of bamboo and garnished with tall copper urns holding golden-green conifers called Granny's ringlets (Cryptomeria japonica 'Spiralis'). An impressive 8-ton dish rock curves into the slope, cradling a soft bubble and flow of water. Repetowski bought the shapely boulder from a Polaroid photo and had it hauled to Seattle from Vancouver, B.C., to be set into the courtyard by crane. Mondo grasses lap at the edges of the bluestone paving, a tracery of maple trees and ginkgo overhead.

The long chute of a side garden offers views toward Lake Washington or back to the courtyard garden. "There's a tendency to always create more planting areas," explains Repetowski, "when what you really want is to move comfortably through the space." To this end, the side garden is kept roomy with a close-cropped privacy hedge underplanted with woodland greenery. A stroll along its stone walkway, past the bonsai, leads to the front garden. Here, an outdoor dining room, spacious enough to seat 20 beneath the wisteria-draped pergola, offers wide-open views to the water.

Repetowski's orchestration of this central-city lot has achieved his goal; we move comfortably through the space.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.