The 187-year-old town of Hudson looks like a location Disney might use to shoot a movie set in a kinder, gentler America — a picture-perfect kind of place where residents expect to enjoy peace only broken by the occasional sound of a lawnmower. But appearances can be deceiving, as one couple discovered. According to David Thorn of Chagrin Falls-based DT Design & Project Management, they could hear traffic on a busy nearby street whenever they ventured into the shady backyard of their white clapboard-sided colonial. “They wanted a place where they could find respite, be transported from their very busy professional careers to a place where they could just feel like they were in an environment that was soothing and out of the hustle bustle of life,” he says. To create that relaxing retreat, Thorn used the length of their half-acre property’s back lot line to build a naturalistic 15- to 20-foot-long stream that flows over a waterfall into an 8-by-15-foot koi pond. The feature not only ...