Landscaping Complete!

Great Job!

Congratulations on a lovely job!

I love the "open concept" of your backyard--with lines that define but do not block one functional space from another. Really a nice design and execution!

I'm curious about where the concepts came from. Did you guys draw up the design or did you have a landscape designer you worked with? I'm also interested in hearing who did the actual masonry work on the firepit and low walls--unless you did it yourself and you're not for hire ;)

If you don't mind sharing the people/company's contact info, I'd love to have such a resource. Our landscaping is due for tuneup next spring... If you're inclined to keep your landscaping secrets to yourself, no pressure.

Thanks.
Jake

You can e-mail directly to me at: eichfan at rawbw dot com

Thanks for the kind words. The design was something we developed ourselves. We drew on several sources of inspiration, including Dwell magazine, Garden Design magazine (the April 2006 edition is especially good) and Google searches on the internet, although these are pretty hit or miss when it comes to searches on modern landscaping.

I knew that it was going to be important to keep the design as mimimalistic as possible to have the most impact. For us, that meant simple geometry and considerable restraint in the number of plants used in the design.

I think when coming up with your own design, it is important to consider what you want to use your yard for. For us, there were 2 specific functional areas we were interested in creating. First, an area to relax and read a book was important... that concept turned into the area under the fig tree that is somewhat sectioned off and has the water feature. The idea of being hidden under the canopy of the fig, with the sound of water was extremely appealing to me. The second functional area was the firepit. We wanted to create this sort of modern take on a campfire. This developed into the square fire pit with built in concrete seating.

In terms of how we went about the overall project, after gathering clip outs from magazines, pictures from the internet, and a rough drawing of when we envisioned, we hired a landscape consultant ($300 for a 2 hour session, email me for contact info for the resource we used) to brainstorm with us a little more. For a pretty penny, he could have done some really high-end designs for us, but in the end, I decided I knew what I wanted enough to hire someone considerably less expensive to implement my design.

So, we used our local community newspaper to find 3 local landscapers, got them to give us free quotes, and I went with the lowest cost option (who luckily enough, was also the one I thought understood my design goals best). The company we chose was very good at coming in on budget, although the actual implementation did take considerably longer than initially quoted, especially the masonry work.

If you would like any of the contractor information, please feel free to email me directly (email address in my profile).