design process using Landscape example, and Q & A
1. Verbal Consultation
Walk your landscape, to understand your preferences, and propose alternatives.
This service gives you two hours of professional advice from a graduate designer and certified horticulturist. While generally this advice is verbal, sometimes we will draw a quick sketch onsite to help you visualize the design more easily.
During a typical consultation, we walk your landscape with you, and assist you in incorporating your ideas and needs into an outdoor living space that works for you. We then give you some workable alternatives to enhance your landscape.
Verbal consultations are helpful in answering:
- How can I make this space fit with the rest of my property?
- How do I make these gardens look great again?
- How can I make this area an inviting place for outdoor entertaining?
- After the Initial Design Consultation is finished, we can provide you with budget information, or a quotation if requested.
- If you are looking for more detail, and drawings with accurate pricing is required, then you should consider a Concept Design drawing.
2. Concept Design
Understand your landscape dreams, take site measurements, prepare base plans, design & present alternative concepts.
Concept designs are useful to explore different landscape alternatives, without the full cost of a Master Plan. Concept designs are appropriate for smaller city landscapes or for simpler components of an estate landscape, such as a stone driveway, or a front garden bed rejuvenation.
For us to develop some alternative design concepts, we'll need to know a lot about you, and how you want to use your outdoor space. So we'll interview you to determine:
- How do you spend your leisure time?
- How do you entertain? Small group of friends? Large crowds? Informal? Formal?
- What views can we enhance? What views can we minimize or improve?
- Is there a need for a deck or patio?
- How do you want to spend your outdoor time in your landscape?
- How can we make all your spaces - front, side, and back yards - work together?
- What level of maintenance would you care to have?
- What are your favourite plants and colours and more...
We'll also measure your property and prepare Base Plans, which tell us all the important dimensions, grades, and location of the house, sheds, driveways and decks etc.
Using these Base Plans and your preferences and goals, we develop one or two Concept Designs. This will then be dimensioned and drawn to scale to assist in accurate quotes, and the contractor must adhere to the final plan rather than a verbal interpretation.
The Concept Designs are presented, and your feedback at the Design Review meeting ensures we have met your needs with the best design alternative.
3. Master Plan
Determine the final design. Prepare detailed plans for construction.
Master Plans are a final design, drawn to scale, ready for construction. Large properties or complex landscape elements will require a Master Plan before commencing construction. Information provided includes hardscape elements such as stonework, decks, or walls drawn to scale, grading, and detailed plant selection. Trees and shrubs are sited exactly and quantities determined, and perennial groupings are specified. Both the Plan View and Perspective View drawings are included. Elevation drawings are generated if they provide information useful to you or the construction team.
4. Reality
Construction, stonework, wood structures, water features, and gardens becomes the new reality.
ENJOY!
Sit back on your new backyard patio, relax, and enjoy the living space we imagined and designed together.
Questions & Answers
1. Why spend money on a Landscape Plan? Some landscapers do designs for free.
Landscaping typically will cost 5% to 15% of the purchase price of your home, totalling tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Spending this amount of money without a plan is like going on a trip, with no map and no destination in mind. You may end up somewhere you like, but it is quite unlikely, and how will you know when you get there? Landscape design and planning is the most important, and often most neglected, part of a landscaping project. "Free" designs can be very costly, the result of spending inadequate time - listening to you, considering alternatives, and performing detailed dimensioning and drawing. green space design demonstrates design ability by showing you completed drawings that demonstrate creativity, careful planning, and detail.
During our initial Verbal Consultation, green space design can determine which design service is appropriate. Concept Designs are recommended if you want some alternatives for a smaller scale project, like a typical suburban front yard or back yard. If you need detailed construction drawings, or if the project of your dreams is large and technically complex, then a Master Plan is required.
3. Can I do the work in stages if I can't afford it all at one time? What should be done first?
Phased implementation is a great way to build your landscape, especially for larger and more expensive projects. green space design is happy to phase your project, prioritizing immediate needs first, and deferring less critical items for later years. A critical issue in phasing a project is minimizing rework, so we'll design the phases such that work done early on doesn't have to be redone later.
4. When is the best time to contact green space design and start the design process?
The reality of the landscape business in northern climates means that we've got eight months to do the hard work, and four months to rest up for next season. We guarantee that we'll have time to dedicate to your design between December and March, our winter slowdown period. Once the snow melts, we're out supervising the designs we worked on all winter, and we don't want you to have to wait until next year for us to be available. We encourage all our clients to work with us during the winter months completing the landscape design, and be ready to build for spring.
5. Why isn't there just one price for Master Plans?
The varying complexity of landscapes makes it impossible to set one price for a Master Plan. Large, technically involved sites naturally take more effort to work through than simpler sites. After completing a Verbal Consultation or Concept Design, and gaining an understanding of the complexity of your requirements, green space design will give you an estimated price on a Master Plan that meets your needs.
6. Why does green space design produce colour Perspective and Plan view drawings? Most landscape firms draw single line drawings in black and white.
Perspective drawings represent the landscape the way it will appear when complete. Everyone - you the client, and green space design the landscape professional - can better envision your property the way it will appear using these drawings. Which helps you better imagine the completed landscape?
7. Can I hire green space design to perform the design, and then do the work myself?
We've done many projects working co-operatively with clients. For instance, you may be comfortable with and enjoy planting, but want to leave us to subcontract the hardscape (brick, stone, wood features). We have also worked with clients who want to "learn on the job" - laying an interlocking stone patio for example. As a design/project management firm, green space design always plays a significant role in the implementation. We'd like to be there solving the technically challenging parts of your project, and ensuring the final result is what you imagined.