This Garden in Mexico Is Full of Fruit Orchards, Flowering Herbs, and Adorable German Shepherds
Outside of San Miguel de Allende, the city’s exuberant colors mellow into a more subdued palette. Inside the gates of Cris Briger’s Mexican country retreat, there’s no Froot Loopy jacaranda and bougainvillea, no bright ochre and magenta buildings, just the soothing shade of green trees.
“It’s our own little oasis,” says Cris, who with her late husband, Paul, ran a furniture business and began working with San Miguel artisans in the early 1990s. Enchanted by this property at the end of a juniper-lined historic road, they began building their country casa, with its seven bedrooms and four-foot-thick walls, in 1998.
The family has spent extended weekends and holidays here, always with a houseful of guests and dogs, for more than two decades. “This more than any place is home. We’ve already spent a lifetime here,” says son Augie Briger, 27, who was four when the house was finished; his brother, Charles Peed, was 12.
“Everything here was built or made by hand—no heavy machinery has been used,” explains Cris, who today counts her two sons as business partners. The three spend much of the year in Palm Beach, growing their cult-favorite antiques and decorating emporium Casa Gusto and dreaming up custom designs, from hand-painted furniture to papier-mâché flowers.
But when in Mexico, Cris and her sons continue that hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves spirit, which on a recent trip entailed planting 72 new trees. “The trees have changed the feel of the garden—it wasn’t just a face-lift,” Augie says.
“It’s an arboretum now or will be,” adds his mom, who sees this property, with its mature juniper and pecan trees among the garden’s 20 varieties, as her legacy. “Its nice to plant 72 trees with my sons, that they’ll know the trees’ history,” she says. While she and Paul initially envisioned a more formal French-influenced garden, “over time, the formality has disappeared,” Augie notes. “It’s more sweet randomness now, more of an English oasis in this Mexican desert.”
That evolution is due to both climate lessons (early lavender bushes revolted after a harsh freeze ricocheted directly into 80 degrees)and the family’s design DNA: for instance, their penchant for endless experimenting, rearranging, and creating new vignettes, whether with a room, a tablescape, or a flower bed. The garden’s ever-shifting nature, “the ceaseless amazement,” is what Cris loves most.
“The idea is that wherever you are on the property, you look ahead and there’s a destination, and once you reach that, you turn and there's another destination,” Cris says. Those “destinations” are frequent settings for alfresco entertaining—“we’ll set a table anywhere. It’s truly a movable feast—everything here revolves around meals,” adds Charles, who loves a tabletop with custom-painted Talavera as much as his mom.
Dinner might be in a courtyard alongside hand-cut stone beds planted with acanthus, rosemary, and flowering sage, and a lazy lunch in the orchard, where pie-shaped ivy wedges skirt under apricot trees. Pear, peach, and apple trees also thrive, and 12-year-old pomegranates are finally about to bloom for the first time. Trellised white roses arc over pebble paths, and dogs, dogs everywhere, plop or romp at will. “It’s their house really; who are we kidding?” Cris says, laughing.
More than anything, this home and its serene garden are a labor and laboratory of love. Memories of Paul are deeply rooted in the trees he planted, the beds he nurtured, and his family’s shared passion. And their extraordinary eye for design and beauty continues to flourish here.
“We always leave full to the brim with new inspiration and ideas,” Cris says. Charles, pointing to the garden-grown acanthus leaves that will become papier-mâché and toile molds for their artisans, likens it to farming: “This is literally where we grow Casa Gusto.”
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This article was featured in the July/August 2023 issue of VERANDA. Photography by Charles Peed; produced by Dayle Wood; written by Stephanie Hunt.
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