Papercity

I had forgotten that I was dealing with a fashion model.
Welcome to Pautz’s world — a dichotomy, indeed. It’s part outdoor adventure, part solving puzzles and part, well, very attractive clothes. How many landscape designers pack a bachelor’s degree in science? How many know about variegated yuccas and John Varvatos? And how many wear Rock & Republic jeans while they rake Mexican beach pebbles into place? I rest my case.
Pautz (pronounced “pouts”) was almost bound for life inside a lab. From 2001 to 2003, and with that new degree from Texas Tech University, he found himself under fluorescent lights, running tests on lotions and shampoos. But, he says, “I was not real happy about being inside.” He ruminated about chasing one of his passions, wildlife biology, but realized the remote locations would be too remote from friends and family. Something else began to tug at him — something that would get him back outside. “I always had a love for gardening.” He got that via pedigree: In the mid-1980s, his mother and stepfather started an organic farm in Forestburg, Texas, north of Denton, where they raised culinary herbs, selling them to a fledgling chain of grocery stores called Whole Foods. (Being ahead of one’s time, case #432.) From age 10, little Jason got pressed into annual summer duty. “We’d wake up in the mornings,” he says, “and start harvesting the fields.”
Fast forward to the lab coat. A friend, knowing Pautz’ penchant for all things agrarian, asked for help with his garden at White Rock Lake. “Then I got the neighbor across the street — then it built from there.” He had been modeling in Dallas, too, out of college, after friends told him he should try it. He sent in a picture, and the Kim Dawson Agency signed him on the spot. He went to New York in 2001 — where he promptly was signed by the famous Ford Agency. But big-city go-sees were not his thing, and, after living in a models’ apartment “for, oh, about a minute,” he says, laughing, he came back. By 2003, with more and more garden projects coming his way, he put away the test tubes and turned to landscape design full-time. Quietly. That’s another dichotomy about Pautz: For all of his obvious intelligence and obvious good looks, he’s terribly unassuming. Speaks softly. Blushes readily. Never makes a fuss. What has that gotten him? Some rather high-profile projects. Enter Ken Downing, the ebullient fashion director of Neiman Marcus, and his partner Sam Saladino, beloved menswear sales associate for same. Pautz was modeling at Neiman Marcus when Josh Goldfarb, his booker at the Kim Dawson Agency, connected him with Downing and Saladino, who happened to be ready to pump up their property. Now, for four years and counting, Pautz has coaxed their Kessler Park lawn into a luxe, lush riff on an Asian garden, by way of Auntie Mame. He stirred in gurgling fountains, blue-gray cedar trees and maples whose barks glow coral-red in the winters and springs. For Sugar Film Production at the highly visible corner of McKinney Avenue and Bowen Street in Uptown, Pautz tapped into his minimalist side, designing massive CorTen steel planter boxes packed with horsetail reed, then planting vibrant red Japanese maples and deep-green Austrian pines to soften the building’s sleek aluminum cladding. Pautz is also the “garden” in the red-hot Park Restaurant, Bar & Garden on Henderson Avenue, where he devised a dining patio out front that boasts enormous wood-slab benches and tables hewn from one fallen cottonwood tree, and Park’s famous bocce-ball court out back, complete with a wall of Mexican feather grass and a series of modernist little cabanas along its length, for canoodling and imbibing.