Houston Landscape Design

What makes your company unique among other Houston landscape design companies?
Most of them are not landscape design companies. The majority of these businesses only work on the organic elements of the front and back yard. Some only do lawn work. Others provide specialized services in garden and flower bed planting and maintenance.

While these are all important parts elements to a residential Houston landscape, they represent only a fraction of what a true landscape design really is. What we create through a landscape design master plan is the equivalent of a home outdoors, complete with outdoor rooms, recreation areas, and special points of interests.

How do you create a home outdoors?
We create a multiplicity of elements linked to the thematic principles established by the architecture of the home itself. In a since, the house on the property is the hub from which the spokes of our design radiate outward into the yard into a diversity of hardscape and softscape forms?

What is a hardscape form?
There is broad definition and a narrow definition. By the broad definition, a hardscape is anything manmade. By the more narrow definition more commonly used in Houston landscape design, it is a manmade horizontal surface such as a deck, a patio, a motorcourt, a driveway, or the tile flooring of a courtyard.

Any manmade structure with a vertical rise is more accurately described as custom masonry or outdoor architecture. These forms include such things as architectural walls, retaining walls, custom planters, ornamental drains, stone steps, columns, and seat walls.

What is a softscape form?
Essentially, it is plant life. This includes lawn grasses, trees, shrubs, garden plants, and ground cover. Softscape design is the process by which plant life is sculpted to reflect mood, theme, and geometric order of the human mind without losing its organic essence in the process.

How do you bring such opposites together?
Well, you are assuming polarities here that really do not exist. Plant life is alive, and architectural forms are living space. In this sense both are living systems of a sort. When we look at life supported living systems we are dealing with compliments, not opposites. This makes landscape design more of an art of creating interdependent and interconnected relationships rather than reconciling what many assume to be irreconcilable opposites.

You mentioned outdoor rooms. What are these?
An outdoor room is really nothing more than a space that has been set apart for a special purpose. Entry gardens, courtyards, morning gardens, and terraces can all be outdoor rooms. Many of these have nothing more than low-level ground cover or small trees that create partial boundaries just high enough to separate them from the rest of the yard, but low enough to permit a clear view of the Houston landscape.

An outdoor building, on the other hand, is more like a room in a home. Generally it has a roof and at least two solid walls to provide shelter from the elements, yet also permit open access to the outdoor spaces of the yard.

Common outdoor rooms include summer outdoor kitchens and arbor living rooms.