Concealed behind gates just steps from Highway 1 in Bodega Bay is a secret sanctuary — a jewelbox of a Japanese garden in miniature, open to visitors.

It’s filled with meticulously sculpted cypress and pine, a flowering cherry tree, a dry stone river and even a tiny tea house.

Ren Brown and his late husband Robert DeVee began the garden almost immediately after moving to the coastal fishing village in 1989, intent on opening a gallery devoted to the Japanese art that Brown had been collecting almost his entire life.

Directly behind the highway-facing gallery was a well-built but frumpy house. The two men scooped it up and began remodeling with a Japanese aesthetic incorporating shoji screens and antique tansus (Japanese cabinets) of every size for displaying Brown’s vast collection of ceramics. The walls are filled with fine contemporary Japanese art.

“It’s what I love,” said Brown, who has been steeped in Japanese culture since he was a boy growing up in the East Bay.

His mother was born and raised in Japan, the daughter of a Southern Presbyterian missionary preacher who traveled on horseback on Japan’s smallest island trying to spread the word of God, without much success. She met Brown’s father when he traveled to Japan to teach English after graduating from college during the depths of the Depression, at a time when there were no jobs.

The elder Brown became fascinated by Japan and came home and earned his doctorate in Japanese history, which he taught at UC Berkeley for many years. The family made frequent trips to Japan, where Brown learned to speak the language, although he has lost much of it from lack of use.

“I was always surrounded by Japanese visitors coming to the house, Japanese art and ceramics,” he recalled of his Berkeley childhood spent with a foot in two cultures.

Brown majored in history at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and carved out a career as a respiratory therapist. For awhile he even toyed with the idea of going to medical school. But it would be the Japanese art of his early life that would prove to be his abiding passion.

That’s evident the moment you step through the torii gate to his small home and find yourself in a tranquil courtyard garden completely enclosed and a world away from the highway just beyond.

Torii are commonly found at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine, symbolically marking the transition from the mundane to the sacred. The one at Brown’s house was made for him by Bruce Johnson, an internationally recognized sculptor of monumental pieces who lives in Sonoma County. In making the gate, he also angled the focus so that rather than opening to a view of the porch and door it frames a view of the garden, at the center of which is a pond where shimmery koi glide peacefully among the stones and past a waterfall.

A covered veranda runs along the front of the house, reminiscent of the long covered porches found on many old Japanese country homes.

An antique Japanese fire gong alerts Brown that visitors are at his door. While they wait for him to open the massive front door, which 150 years ago was inside a storage shed somewhere in rural Japan, they can inspect what looks like a weathered Japanese dollhouse but in fact is a kamidana, a Shinto home shrine.

Brown and DeVee enlisted Halcyonn & Roberto Campoamor of Berkeley to take an ordinary house that Brown recalls many years later as “hideous” and give it a serene Japanese feel. There are bamboo floors and a large room with open ceiling of vertical grain fir for relaxing while admiring some of Brown’s prized pieces.

Among them is a large silkscreen triptych that gives a sense of peering into a large aquarium of tropical fish. It is by Mayumi Oda, a Japanese-born artist who at one time lived in Muir Beach and is often referred to as “the Japanese Matisse” for her use of color.

The Ren Brown Collection Gallery and Japanese Garden:

Contact: 707-875-2922. renbrown.com. Email rbc4art@renbrown.com

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday

Japanese garden: The gate to the garden is open to visitors whenever the gallery is open. There is no admission fee.

Inset in one living room wall is an antique cypress wood tansu built to store futons. The depth is perfect to hide a TV. Above is a slate mantle with a slight bend that mimics a bend in the railing of the wood deck above the Japanese garden.

Above the tansu is a display area with a collection of cherished ceramic pieces. The greatest treasure is the smallest: an at-first unassuming little piece Brown scored on a pottery tour of Japan. Not much more than a foot high, it is an asymmetrical incense burner with a lid that looks like old iron but is in fact wood.

“I just flipped. I had never seen anything like it,” said Brown, holding up his prize.

When his fellow travelers saw what he had, they also flipped. It turned out to be a piece by Kakurazaki, “a living national treasure.”

Brown collects Japanese art from multiple sources, whether they are Japanese Americans working here or Americans working in Japan.

“Each piece means something,” said Brown, whether it is something inherited from his parents or something he collected, from a well-known artist or someone or more modest renown.

Many small details helped Brown bring a bit of Japan to Bodega Bay. Closet doors are made from bamboo or are light wood summer doors from Japan. Shoji screens allow light in while also offering privacy. A round moon window at the end of the galley kitchen provides a beautiful frame for the courtyard koi pond and a blush of camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas.

There are tansus for every purpose. A mizuya made for the kitchen serves as a sideboard in the dining room, where Brown had a table custom made from an antique Japanese door. A kaidan, or step chest, in the entryway serves as more display space. But at one time it would have been used as an interior ladder. And just inside the door is a geto bako, or shoe cabinet, although Brown long ago abandoned the practice of removing his shoes upon entering his home.

One very Japanese feature is a tokonoma, a traditional interior alcove created for displaying flowers and artwork and perhaps a scroll and piece of pottery. Each piece is carefully curated. Brown has one in his dining room.

Incorporated in it is a special post made from a tree Brown and DeVee recovered from the beach that had been polished by the waves. Such pieces are often found in tokonomas.

Brown said he often just sits in a chair in the living room and looks through his art-filled space to the tokonoma and feels a sense of profound appreciation for a house that so beautifully reflects and contains all that he loves.

Brown began his Japanese garden almost as soon as he sold his Berkeley home and began building his dream gallery of Japanese art in Bodega Bay.

The gate is open during gallery hours, an invitation to visitors to pass through to an enchanted world of expertly trimmed evergreens and serpentine pathways with turns offering different views. At the entrance is a large piece by Johnson, whose signature is typically redwood embellished with copper details.

Johnson made the piece for an event at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in which Japanese Americans gave thanks for the support they they received from the community while they were incarcerated in relocation camps during World War II.

Brown curated the exhibit and was captivated by that piece, metal with a sculpted juniper growing in the middle. When one of his gardeners complained about the Asian pear tree he had growing at the entrance, he knew the exact piece that should replace it. And fortunately, Johnson still had the Japanese garden sculpture.

Brown sought out the best when it came to pruning. Precision sculpting of trees is a fundamental feature of Japanese gardens. Michael Alliger, a master aesthetic pruner who for many years has maintained the exquisite garden at Osmosis Spa in Freestone, also tends Brown’s much smaller garden.

Alliger said Brown’s garden is “very authentic.

“Having trees that stand out as the primary function of the garden rather than the secondary plants, and the winding path so as you go through the garden the garden reveals itself, as well as the use of rock,” are all hallmarks of traditional Japanese gardens, he said.

The trees, like Japanese black pine, are carefully trimmed to open them up and showcase the trunk and branching structure. It’s not hard, said Alliger, but takes a lot of focus, concentration and timing.

“It’s pretty every month of the year here,” Brown said of the garden he happily shares with anyone who wants to take a peek and feel its serenity. “There are different things that bloom. But the strength and power of the shaped tree is what holds everything together and makes it unified.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com. OnTwitter @megmcconahey.

Like most everyone, I love a good feature story that takes me somewhere I’ve never been or tells me something I don’t know. Where can I take you? Who in Sonoma County would you like to know better? I cover the people, places and ideas that make up Sonoma County, with general features, people profiles and home and garden, interior design and architecture stories. Hit me up with your tips, ideas and burning questions.

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