Home Garden Design

Glorious home garden designs inspire us, essentially affecting how we experience our living environment. Gardens are places of rest, where we re-create in the most basic sense of that word. Gardens are about pleasure, sensual and tactile. They are ever-evolving—where you can see change each passing day, season, year.

A vital outdoor landscape design, created, installed and maintained by Exterior Worlds, opens up a realm of possibilities. We help Houston outdoor living come to life with a customized home garden design. We invest each plan with fresh and inventive ways that make your garden engage the senses. Our aim is to turn your garden into a place where plants—and people—flourish.

In contemplating a home garden design, we encourage our clients to think in terms of creating harmony with colors. For instance, we might combine yellow pansies, blue bachelor’s buttons and purple lavender, layered against each other. It is similar to mixing voices together, but instead of a chorus of bass, alto and soprano, you have a choir of color.

We also like home garden designs that celebrate our regional character, maybe highlighting tropical plants. We also think it is important to complement your home’s architecture. For instance, use a Tuscany garden theme to enhance a Mediterranean-style home.

While planning a garden, we discuss with clients which plants should lead the design. This idea embraces the philosophy that says there needs to be emphasis on both hardscapes and softscapes. This idea underscores the point that concrete, paved paths, fences and walls are necessary but also static. Greenery and plants enliven the composition. It is the soft, growing life against the hard, solid mass that captures our attention and imagination.

Other elements we might factor into our designs:

• Landscape lighting design. A well-designed lighting plan extends the gratification you derive from your gardens by letting you enjoy it at night. The introduction of wavering shadows, soft light and full darkness lets you take in the scene with new eyes.
• Custom fountain designs. With a variety of styles to choose from, including water wall fountains, and pool water fountains, water fountains create a wonderful ambiance in gardens. In selecting a fountain, we encourage our clients to be cognizant of their home’s architecture and other material choices they have made. Another water element idea is a pond landscape design which makes a beautiful addition to a backyard. Ponds, when stocked with colorful fish like koi, have the additional benefit of putting movement into your landscape.
• Rock landscape design. Rocks and stones bring unique qualities to a garden. They encourage patience and restraint in a too-busy world. They have an innate steadiness, counterbalanced by graceful fluidity. A stone landscape could provide the tranquility your soul seeks.
• Vegetable garden design. If your tastes run toward the functional and the aesthetic, you might consider a vegetable garden, something that makes sense in these ecologically-sensitive times. All the time, energy and effort you put into a vegetable garden is well worth it when you bite into a plump homegrown tomato or taste the sharpness of your very own green onions.

Exterior Worlds, for all your landscape needs.

Modern Garden Décor

When we talk about modern garden décor, we are literally talking about décor. Décor is a phenomenon; the ground and center of a garden’s aesthetic. The modern garden is no different than any other garden in this respect. What makes it unique is the type of décor we find within it. It departs from the organic aesthetic that we normally visualize when we picture a garden in our minds, and it ventures instead into the realm of the unknown and the abstract. Using modern materials and basic geometric forms, its seeks to establish a purely mental awareness of itself as a uniquely human realm overshadowing the former realm of Nature.

This does not mean that modern garden decor departs from the principles of beauty and proportion. On the contrary, it seeks to establish beauty and form with accoutrements that function like jewelry on the landscape. Any number of materials can be used to create complex forms out of geometric shapes. Simple shapes are the building blocks of simplicity which help convey the impression of beauty in latent form. The rest is up to the designer to create new realities of form by skillful combinations that represent new or innovative points of view.

While the materials vary widely and the potential number of forms is only limited by the extent of the designer’s imagination, there is an attribution consistent throughout that can be immediately recognized as modernesque in its intention. Clarity and light are consistently represented in all of the many types of modern garden element by the polish and sparkle that appear on the surfaces of the forms themselves. Either the landscape designer chooses a material that by its very nature shines, or the designer polishes its surface and positions it in such a way that it always brings light to the occasion in some respect.

Some of the shapes we find here originated in ancient times and have been expressed in new ways to reflect our current world. The old image of the pillar or obelisk is something we have all seen in films and stories about the distant past. Such monoliths are often depicted rising up from the earth out of places of stone, fire, and rock, or at other times, water and greenery. It is no different in today’s modern garden décor.

We can take a steel post or stucco column, polished and gleaming, and position it in the midst of gravel beds, hardscape structures, or Spartan plantings of dark green ground cover.. Steel walls can be used to frame a garden or to hang objects. Such an image conveys a sense of magnitude, or even possibly suggests that which is monumental. Placed in relationship to a contemporary style home or modern office building, it commands attention an attention and focus that in turn is transferred to other forms.

Steel can also be used as a fountainhead that feeds a disappearing fountain or infinity pool. To magnify the reflectivity of water we may also work the steel in with other forms made from glass, granite, or marble. This provides a more appropriate compliment to the multi-dimensional aspects of water and better feeds awareness with a stream of pure abstract consciousness that is selectively supported by the organic, yet strangely free from dependence on it and unique vibrant with an energy of its own.

Ornamental Iron Railings

A sign and symbol of a luxury landscape design, ornamental iron railings instill your landscape design with subtle refinement. During our more than two decades in business, Exterior Worlds has come to believe that they are emblematic of homeowners who envisage and mold their total living environment, both interior and exterior. With the fitting and beautifully rendered ornamental iron railing, they are saying, “Here, everything matters.”

Our clients believe that ornamental iron railings are one of those extra finishing touches that move a landscape into a superlative category. In a similar fashion, it’s the way a fire and water fountain raises the design quotient for custom swimming pools and outdoor water fountains. Likewise how French drains add a design element to a drainage system.

Over the years, we have installed such railings as part of an outdoor kitchen, to partition off the eating area, for example. We have also integrated them into patio designs along a staircase or at the step-down into the yard. Ditto deck designs when the deck is built on several levels.

In general, railings are part of hardscapes, the non-plant material of landscaping. This category includes such structural outdoor elements as wrought iron arbors, outdoor gazebos, wrought iron trellises and garden arches. In the modern landscape, Exterior Worlds has used ornamental iron for the structural: window grilles, banisters, balconies, doors, screens, door panels, copings, pilasters, and column capitals. And for functional ornamentation: landscape lighting fixtures, door knockers, door handles, iron wall planters, gate ornaments, finials and hinges.

Railings are typically an open design so as to let the gaze out and the view in. They, along with ornamental iron fences, ornamental iron gates, wrought iron driveway gates and other iron elements, can be tailor-made to your individual requests. In choosing your design, you have many options to consider—from the classic to the contemporary.

Ornamental iron, also called wrought iron, has provided strength of form and a sense of authenticity since The Middle Ages. While true wrought iron is mainly used today in historic preservation work, this ancient art form still captivates us—even though we don’t use a fire and anvil anymore.

But if the old ways interest you, you can obtain antique ornamental iron pieces. The stair railing from Barcelona or the balcony railing from a French chateau could add an appealing sense of history to your landscape’s overall ambiance. Exterior Worlds can retro-fit these historic and fascinating pieces into your landscape, based on your specific need.

We have also found that commercial landscape design, as well as private residences, benefits from decorative railings and other ornamental iron elements. Whether in an embellished pattern that recalls de Medici’s Italy or a sparse contemporary design worthy of Rothko, ornamental iron railings speak of sustainability and substance. It makes the statement finely, with a delicate touch, with a certainty born of wherewithal.

Ornamental iron railings stand for an understated, but pertinent concept within the lexicon of landscape architecture. A perfect blend of form and function, wrought iron railings make utility look beautiful, give wings to pure function.

Swimming Pool Designer

Acting as general contractor and project design specialist, Exterior Worlds works with the best swimming pool designers in the area to help you make your dream for a custom swimming pool—from the simple to the elaborate—a reality.

The list of landscape possibilities for pools is nearly endless and varied. Maybe you want a plush entertainment area. If so, then we can devise a plan that might include a deck design with outdoor gazebo, retaining walls that double as seating, an outdoor room or an outdoor kitchen around a poolscape that was especially designed for you by your selected swimming pool designer. If your dream is for more of a private retreat, we can set the scene with a pool and spa, verdant greenery and a suitable privacy fence, perhaps embellished with antique ornamental iron flourishes.

Following are the broad steps we usually follow as project design specialists in working with you and swimming pool designers:

• As the project design specialist, Exterior Worlds takes an overview of the entire job. This position entails listening to your desires and needs, accounting for the site’s potential and limitations, integrating the pool into your overall landscape design, scheduling the workflow and adhering to budget requirements. Part of this job means recommending the appropriate swimming pool designer and, with more than two decades in this business, we know the true players in this region.
• Our team will visit you at your home to gather information about what your goals are. How will you use the pool? What do you want the pool to look like, the rest of the landscape? We will also assess what is feasible, including measuring the yard and noting sunlight patterns. Our goal is to incorporate your ideas and preferences into a seamless layout that is both elegant and functional.
• The pool designer will then submit the pool’s design for your approval. We will also make sure that you understand what to expect during the construction phase—of the pool and any other elements you have requested. After you have signed off on the plans, we begin construction. Most luxury swimming pools take about two to three months to build, depending on weather.

One team member that Exterior Worlds offers its clients is a designated project coordinator. It has been our experience that pool construction projects that do not have a dedicated coordinator drag on and go over budget. There are numerous steps to constructing a pool and they must be done in a logical order. A tight rein over those steps saves you money.

If your poolscape is older and looks outdated, a remodeling job by Exterior Worlds can breathe new life into it. We can make it look young again, which has the side benefit of increasing your property’s value.

As experts in remodeling jobs, we highly recommend using a general contractor or project design specialist. Remodeling jobs are more technical than new pool construction and require agile problem-solving skills. Additionally, we employ our expertise to keep the pool in scale and relationship with your existing landscape elements.

Call Exterior Worlds at 713-827-2255 for project management of pool construction or pool remodeling.

Modern Water Gardens

Modern water gardens create a feeling of life in the realm of the abstract and mathematical. The intent of anything modern and contemporary is to emphasize the preeminence of man above the forces of nature. Since Nature is associated with greenery in collective consciousness, the presence of greenery in a modern water garden must be very selective—or even minimized—in places. Hard straight lines, abrupt intersections, and linear movements that fan out at times into radiuses (half circle constructions) establish a stark, Spartan view of the world. Water reduces the sense of life to its most raw and elemental base, and outcroppings of greenery strategically placed within the form indicated potentials of emergence more so than lush realities of organic comforts.

Modern water gardens are ideal centerpieces for courtyards and atriums. They create a focal point of fluidity within form that captivates attention and lends itself to tranquility and relaxation. In commercial environments, we build a lot of these in break areas. Colleges and universities will also hire us to build study areas around these gardens to give their students an alternative to the cloister of cubicles and library walls. Fountains are very commonly built within these structures to complete the feeling of a meditative environment where time has been removed from the present moment.

Water features are often constructed of natural stones like granite that have been quarried, shaped, and polished to a high degree of sophistication. The shells and copings around modern gardens often gleam as brightly as the water they contain. Quarried slabs of granite can be laid in symmetrical patterns to create any number of geometric shapes. Rectangular gardens can be built alongside of homes, architectural walls, or as “visual bridges” between major landscape design elements. Functionality can be built into these structures in the form of patio seating areas, sidewalk structures, and stepping stone walkways that move across the surface of the water. Linear modern water gardens in these instances can actually define progressions of physical movement as well as the movement of the eye.

This opens the door for the modern water garden to be the focal point of events in a modern landscape design. By bringing the gathering to the edge of the water, one defines the tone of the activity with the sophisticated aesthetic of polished stones, flowing water, gravel, small trees, and geometric plantings of dark green vegetation and sprinklings of coloration produced by controlled plantings of flowering plants. The most popular color in these gardens is white because it provides an excellent complement to the colors of stones and gravel and a superb contrast as well to the dark greens of boxwoods, mondo grass, and other dark green colors. Light green vegetation is normally avoided because it is a bit too lively for the controlled setting we are looking to create in these environments.

Water features always have a streamlined appearance. Flow is quite thanks to silent pumps and hidden mechanisms move the water in a linear progression from one end of the structure to the other. This keeps the modern water garden from appearing too forced in its mentalist, absolute design. Water that flows like a stream or waterfall softens the surrounding features of rock, gravel, polished coping, and custom fountain design with a soothing fluidity that brings a sense of harmony to the mix of hardscape and accent softscape elements that surround it. This, again, makes for an ideal gathering place on any contemporary landscape where conversation, celebration, and appreciation all flow together into the same emotional stream.

Swimming Pool Companies

So, if you want to put in a pool or remodel an old one—where to start? Most people think of swimming pool companies, a natural assumption. Swimming pool companies are the people with the skill and expertise to actually build the pool. The construction begins with grading and excavating the site. This phase is followed by installing rebar, or reinforced steel, and the electrical and plumbing work. At this point, the pool is ready for the initial inspection. Once approved, the next step is to spray on gunite, the concrete-like substance that forms the shell of the pool. After it cures, the coping and tile are then installed.

However, to ensure the best final outcome, you should give serious consideration to hiring a general contractor or project designer, like Exterior Worlds, before you even think about the construction phase. As project designers, we are specialists in keeping your custom swimming pool project moving, on track and on budget. Also, through our many years in business, we have developed relationships with the best experts for each particular task, which includes knowing the best swimming pool companies in this area.

We are experts in helping you define the best pool for you and your family. This skill includes developing the right questions and the right answers, such as:

• How best to keep children safe? Perhaps an ornamental iron fence around the pool.
• Will you be using the pool for business and formal entertaining? Maybe an outdoor room, complete with outdoor fireplace and entertainment center, would be enjoyable.
• Do you work long daytime hours and will use the pool mostly at night? If so, Exterior Worlds are experts in landscape lighting.

We are also experts on the codes and regulations in the different cities and neighborhoods of this region. This expertise covers appropriate tree preservation programs to protect the valuable trees on your lot, a skill-set most swimming pool companies do not have. Over the years, we have saved our clients a lot of money in this one aspect alone.

In most of the luxury landscape designs that we work in, the pool is just one element. At Exterior Worlds, we take a turnkey approach to your yard and therefore consider other hardscapes, such as garden structures (to create auxiliary focal points for variety) or pathways (that accentuate the pool as the main focal point).

Some of our clients have a theme for their landscapes, such as a classic landscape design or Mediterranean landscape design, which we take it into consideration when planning the pool. As an example: for the contour of a luxury swimming pool within a classic landscape design, we might suggest an oval or rectangle—in other words, traditional geometric shapes. It acts as a frame for the water and becomes a classic design element itself.

For another idea that is both beautiful and efficient, consider combining the pool with a pool water fountain. It heightens your visual and auditory pleasure of the pool while, at the same time, eliminating some maintenance redundancies of two separate bodies of water.

Swimming Pool Builders

Swimming pool builders are the specialists you call upon for the actual building of the pool’s structure. Their work begins with the groundwork—digging the hole into the desired shape and installing the rebar that becomes the supporting foundation of the pool. The next steps require applying the gunite to the shell and plastering it.

For more than 20 years, Exterior Worlds has served as general contractor and project designer for swimming pool construction. Our expertise includes pools for existing homes, new home construction and pool remodeling. We provide the essential, and often money-saving, service of scheduling the various contractors, such as the swimming pool builder, the mason workers and electricians, so that the project is completed on time. This oversight also ensures that the work flow is logical to avoid having to tear out completed work and start over because one step was out of sequence.

An additional benefit of using our project design services is that we take your dreams and desires for your pool and integrate them into your overall garden design. For instance, you may want to situate the pool so that your summer kitchen opens onto it. Or perhaps your patio design has an outdoor fire place that creates a secondary focal point. We work hard to make sure that all the zones of your landscape design are in proper relationship with each other.

Before you get to the point of needing a swimming pool builder, we will help you go through the decisions of the pre-construction phase, which includes these considerations:

• Material choices. Pool decking, usually some kind of masonry or stone, surrounds the immediate area around a luxury swimming pool. For pool decking, the choice of materials varies depending on personal preferences, preferred budgets and design considerations. We recommend surfaces like stone, brick and concrete as beautiful and durable options because these non-slippery products are good for wet areas. We also encourage our clients to coordinate their selection with any existing materials, as in a mature landscape and on the exterior of their home.
• The extras. Landscape lighting creates additional pleasure—few elements in a landscape have quite the visual power created by the interplay of water, light and shadow. Thus, good landscape lighting allows you to enjoy the pool at night even when you’re not in it. It also makes the pool safer for nighttime swimming. Speaking of safety, we also discuss with our clients the option of a pool fence. An ornamental iron fence around the pool is often a sensible—and attractive—provision.
• Pool options. There are scores of add-ons you can put onto your pool to increase your overall enjoyment of it. For example, spas, caves, natural falls, a pool water fountain, slides, diving boards and vanishing edges. We help our clients think through how they intend to use the pool and what features would be practical, yet enhance their pleasure.

Custom swimming pools turn a backyard into a perfect entertainment area, whether your lifestyle involves business entertainment or creating a fun center for children and teens. Let Exterior Worlds find the right swimming pool builder for you.

Exterior Worlds has been providing landscape services, including project management for swimming pools construction and remodeling, to upscale neighborhoods in the Houston area since 1987. Call 713-827-2255 for a consultation.

Contemporary Koi Ponds

Contemporary koi ponds are deliberately manmade forms that follow established rules of geometric order. The landscape does not so much determine what size or shape the koi pond takes, but rather the architecture of the home and to a certain extent surrounding hardscape elements. Contemporary koi ponds have been built throughout River Oaks, Rice Village, Memorial, and Hedwig Village near homes that feature all sorts of architectural themes, but have one thing in common.

The traditional koi pond is built in a more freeform style that mimics natural ponds and lakes. Typically these ponds are built near trees or gardens to create a park like or even wilderness theme within the landscape design. It is not so with contemporary koi ponds. As with all contemporary styles, organic presence is minimized and abstract conceptualization is elevated through the forms of geometry. Rectangles, squares, triangles, and radiuses (semicircles or half circles) are the preferred shapes that landscape architects tend to work with.

The minimal organic presence does not mean that the contemporary koi pond lacks all feeling of life. Quite the opposite is true. Life is simply more subdued within the form. Vegetation being minimized, it is the water that creates the dimension and the sense of life. The combination of the hard absolutes of straight lines and angles and the soft fluidity of clear essence adds a calming aesthetic to the abstract element of mind. Instead of trees and shrubs lining its banks, you see ornamental copings made from high grade materials. Instead of colorful flowers hanging into the water, you see colorful fish rising up to the surface. The fish bring movement to the pond, and sometimes gifts of attention. Koi have been known to let people feed them by hand.

Contemporary koi ponds are sometimes built like swimming pools as separate elements in the landscape design. When we build them in this fashion, we normally place them along a trail or walkway that guests will stroll down and pause for a moment to look at the forms and the water and the fish. At other locations we may build a pond as part of a modern garden. A rectangular or square design works best in this environment with a radius arc that moves the water and the fish partly into the perimeter of the garden. This works exceptionally well in modern tropical garden design, where the minimalist planting of vegetation is offset first by the use of exotic plants, and second by the introduction of geometric abstracts into hardscape design and semi-organic space.

Other clients of Exterior Worlds simply love water and fish so much that they want their contemporary koi pond to be the center of attention and activity. For these clients, we can design the pool as a quadrilateral element with a radius arc on one side. This will in turn allow us to wrap a custom patio or high-grade wooden deck around its perimeter, softening the contemporary design just enough to make it comfortable and peaceful to sit by. A waterfall can be added at the opposite end to enhance the calming effect that water has on the mind, and lighting can be placed under the waterfall to convey a sense of living presence and vitality in what originally began as a simple, and rather sterile, geometric form.

Small Modern Garden

The benefit of a small modern garden is you put one virtually anywhere on the landscape as an accent to architectural forms or to create a small, special environment dedicated to a special purpose. Space is never an issue with these forms because they are built to scale with smaller scaled items. Smaller stones and center profile materials are employed to create the illusion that there is actually more room within the garden than there actually is.

Small modern gardens are found everywhere around townhomes, schools, and commercial environments. We see this a great deal in office parks where buildings are crowded together and there is very little open space available for break areas. Property managers will hire us to build atriums and courtyards in the corner areas that form between the exterior of a building and the adjoining sidewalk.

Many atriums will have a custom fountain in the center of converging radii decorated that is decorated with a layer of dark gravel. Lights are installed in the fountain to add beauty to the grounds at night, and vegetation is used to round out corners and line the exterior wall of the building. Vegetation here is also utilized as a compliment the geometric structure of the building with a focused living presence that actually provides a very realistic reflection of the professional mindset of the business cycle.

In school yards and community colleges we often will build small modern gardens as entry gardens. Entry gardens are ideal transitional spaces that help move the mind from the hard interior structures of the school building itself into the more open campus areas intended for recreation and relaxation. Entry gardens can also be built on the sides of school buildings to provide transitional movement away from parking areas.

Larger campuses and office parks typically want more than one small modern garden. In many of these settings, we are working between multiple buildings that are connected by sidewalks, patios, and even parking lots. There are plenty of opportunities for gardens in all of these places. Linear gardens can be planted along the length of the sidewalk. Sections can be removed from patios, and the resulting space can be landscaped and planted accordingly.

In the more open, roomy spaces, courtyards can be built that feature complex geometric hardscape designs, strategic and minimalist plantings of vegetation, and trees in the center of converging radii. As we do in all modern gardens, we use very dark colored shrubs, ground cover, and grasses to provide complimentary organic accent to rock, concrete, and gravel formations.

In townhomes where space is limited, we may build two small modern gardens in the front of the dwelling, one on either corner of the yard. We can either build these within the driveway area itself (in the case of a motor court), or we may utilize empty space between the arc of a small circle drive and the exterior of the house. One very popular design is to develop these areas as gravel patios with a single tree planted in the center.

Modern Home Garden

The modern home garden is a contemporary style intended to work as a direct corollary to modern or contemporary home architecture.

The complimentary power of a modern home garden is multi-dimensional. It is a blend of reflection and contrast. Without this juxtaposition of opposing aesthetics, the garden would appear too minimalist and lose its innate power of attention and magnification. However, when opposing corollaries are fused into a focused synthesis, a modern home garden can appear to be as complex and structurally robust as the house whose form it works to enhance.

Lines in the modern home garden are used to reflect linear forms in the home architecture. By lines we mean any hardscape structure or design within a hardscape that moves in a straight progression along a horizontal or vertical axis. This includes the boundaries of the garden as well as decorative elements within it. Some of these designs call for the construction of small architectural walls that loosely resemble a courtyard or entry garden. Others utilize stones or brick laid out in sharp linear patterns and right angles to convey a sense of horizontal and vertical movements. Such progressions mirror the edifice of the home exterior and help create a subconscious sense of framing in the mind of the viewer.

Radii also play an important role in today’s modern home garden. This is because modern architecture often features curves that soften and connect the otherwise harsh and separatist elements of rigid angles and stark linearity. Radii that are either designed into the hardscape itself or generated by a creative planting of dark green, low-level ground cover provide direct visual correspondence to these curved spaces and give the entire edifice a sense of extension.

Keep in mind that we are not talking here about the typical circular forms and compound curves you see in traditional architecture. These are more like arcs and cut-out segments of circles than a truly round geometric design. They are more like fluid line segments that arcs diagonally juxtaposed against intersecting perpendicular lines that create right angles. In architecture, these arcs often add a visual flare to the areas along rooftops and portions of the wall adjacent to windows. In modern home gardens, they can occupy one or more quadrants of a quadrilaterals-shaped planting, or they can shoot off the end of a linear planting to create the illusion of multi-dimensional geometry.

As complex as it sounds, modern home garden design is not so much a complex garden form in and of itself, but rather a collage of simple geometric patterns in vegetation and hardscapes whose near infinite number of combinations compound into images that are representative of the abstract qualities of mind and independent from any recognizable form beyond that of the simple circle, line, angel, or arc.

Wrought Iron Arbor

A wrought iron arbor communicates strength while functioning as a backdrop for luscious, flowering vines. And it is that mixture of enduring and ephemeral, hard and soft, that Exterior Worlds find so compelling about wrought iron arbors.

Wrought iron has been around for centuries as an art form. It has been used as decoration in fine homes and gardens in the Mediterranean countries, Europe and in the Americas. You can see it in the forms of doors, balconies, gates, fences, window grilles, shutters, hardware and furniture, both new and antique.

Our clients desire wrought iron for its beauty as well as its functionality—providing utility, security and privacy. In addition to arbors, we use it for other outdoor structures and architectural features. Also, for accents, accessories and functional ornamentation. Since it is a strong material, we like to showcase its intrinsic strength, although it can be used to good effect in most any design.

We can custom-make wrought iron works that are rich in detail in such classic styles as Renaissance, Gothic, Louis XV, Art Deco or Art Nouveau. We also offer more contemporary designs using other metals like stainless steel, bronze or copper. Additionally, we can retro-fit wrought iron antiques to fit your design needs.

As for arbors, they have been part of landscape architecture at least since the 1600s. Nowadays, they can also be made of treated wood, galvanized aluminum, and stone combined with wrought iron, wood or aluminum. Your only limitation on design options is what complements your house’s architecture and the other material you’ve chosen for your landscape design.

Arbors belong to the sub-group called garden structures. Generally, they are an open-air composition covered on top by a solid roof or lattice work. We think they are particularly beautiful when serving as the framework on which vines grow. This combination of man-made structure and natural greenery creates a lovely, green shaded area.

Exterior Worlds has used arbors as free-standing structures or to provide a passageway between different elements in your landscape design, such as a covered walkway to a rose garden, an outdoor water fountain or a custom swimming pool. We have also used their height and interest to create a focal point on a deck or patio design.

A wrought iron arbor can also be practical. We have trained fruit-bearing and vegetable vines to grow on them. In places where it is hard or not practical to grow trees or where an open, airy space is preferred, we have built them to provide welcoming relief from the sometimes overbearing sun.

In Mediterranean landscape design and English garden design, a wrought iron arbor is a pleasant addition. It accentuates the landscape style while providing a place to grow a colorful vine such as bougainvillea or a scented one like old-fashioned honeysuckle.

We also recommend wrought iron for other elements within your landscape—fences, a trellis, wrought iron driveway gates, to name a few. A wrought iron garden gate inserted in a privacy fence creates a welcoming counterbalance of openness. An antique wrought iron wall element conveys an appreciation of history.

Call Exterior Worlds at 713-827-2255 to discuss placing wrought iron elements in your landscape.

Luxury spas

Luxury spas are either part of a custom swimming pool or an outdoor room. The point of a spa is to provide you with a hot water experience outdoors. The simplicity of its function becomes a landscaping phenomenon when form is designed to capture the essence of the experience and support the many feelings of good will it brings to the soul.

Customized Bench Heights
Humans have this curious tendency to want to get only their feet wet. This is not something we want to discourage or ignore, but instead cater to. To do this, we need to build most of luxury spas with surrounding, custom benches that let people sit at a comfortable height but still get their feet in the water.

All Tile Basins
Like swimming pools, luxury spas re actually shells that hold the water itself. It is essential to make them look as attractive as can be. After all, everyone who gets into the spa will suddenly be surrounded by these walls. The best way to make them superb in appearance is to build them out of tile. And, just it is done in the world of flooring and luxury bathrooms; the actual number of styles and colors you can pick from is more than you can count.

Air Bubblers
Air bubbles add sensation and movement to the luxury spa living experience. Air bubblers are hidden at the bottom of the shell and driven by silent, subsurface pumps.

Zero Overhang Coping
Coping must be modified in a luxury spa to keep from hurting a person’s back or the back of a person’s head when they recline backwards in the water. Most spas are designed with along curved lines anyway, so a zero overhand coping also helps give snug feeling of wraparound comfort to the moment.

Therapy Jets
Many people have suffered from unfortunate accidents that hurt their backs, knees, and legs. There doctors then told them to treat themselves with hot water therapy. For these persons, we build hidden therapy jets into the basin that aim pressurized streams of water with just enough gentle force to massage, relax, and soothe sore muscles, achy joints, and herniated discs.

Custom Controls and Underwater Lights
Every individual’s comfort level is different, which is why we install custom controls in all of our luxury spas. We also install underwater lights so everyone’s face will light up as illumination springs from the surface of the water at night.

Residential Architecture

French Homes
French residential architecture can be accented by an ordered arrangement of shrubs and bushes that establish order and symmetry. The most famous French landscaping design is a parterre garden. Its cross-shaped design creates paths of gravel through walls of green. From a pedestrian point of view, it surrounds a person with rising walls of life. From an elevated vantage point, it divides the landscape into living quadrants of green. The modern parterre garden and French gardens are usually based on elements of the original, traditional form.

Italian Two Story and Townhomes
Italian residential architecture owes a great deal to the Roman Empire. Rome loved its structures so much that it often developed lifestyle itself around structure. Modern Italian art and architecture are much more opulent and somewhat Romantic compared to their Imperial predecessors, but there yet remains a touch of the classical in today’s Italian gardens that personify a fascinating blend of opulence and discipline.

Modern and Contemporary Homes
Modern and contemporary residential architecture are dedicated to man’s attempt to understand himself in relationship to himself alone. It relies heavily on geometric hardscapes, clear lines, sharp angles, and curious forms of 3D art. Only small areas of green are permitted on a modern landscape due because of its contention that Nature is neither something to be cherished nor destroyed, but rather ignored in pursuit of the supremely mathematical and rational.

Colonial Homes
Colonial residential design has a great deal of Old World formality still present in its design. However, like it is with most things American, you see find a relaxation of certain elements. Flower beds do not have to be perfect, but they do have to be neat. Trees do not need to be furiously trimmed every day, but they do need consistent maintenance and care. Walls and fountains should rise up more that hug the ground to mirror the archetypal columns that symbolize the whole essence of Colonial forms.

Traditional American Homes
Traditional residential architecture is characterized by a love for the beauty of simplicity and the practicality of daily life. It projects an essence of conservatism that is also curiously blended on the option of free thinking at the drop of a hat.

Accordingly, the landscape designs around traditional homes consist of basic elements like gardens, pools, fountains, flower beds, patios, and decks. Their uniqueness is generated in consultation where actual materials and arrangements of such things are determined by the personal values and tastes of the homeowner.

Waterfall Landscape Design

Waterfall landscape design is something of a cornerstone in pond and natural swimming pool construction. Perhaps nothing else makes a pond look more natural than a waterfall. We use all natural materials such as boulders and limestone to create the appearance of miniature cliffs. We lay all of these stones by hand, making sure to position them in patterns that emulate rock formations in the wild. By concealing silent pumps just the rear of these formations, we can recreate the scene of a mountain stream pouring over the edge of a mountain into still below.

People typically hire us to build them a swimming pool that is more than a pool to simply swim in. It is a gathering place and an architectural feature as well. Because the swimming pool works on many levels to establish the landscape as a realm of outdoor luxury living, it is not uncommon to build pools with special features such as spas, water jets, and a waterfall.

In one sense, a Japanese garden is a waterfall landscape design in its own right. Originating East as a carefully manicured environment dedicated to sacred space and meditation, the Japanese form has become popular in the West as a water feature and personal locale of seclusion. Not every client of Exterior Worlds wants a Japanese garden for the same spiritual reasons as its historical progenitors, but all who invest in this form note that it brings a remarkably calming effect to their minds and ultimately becomes something of a retreat that is intimately personal and reflective of to their particular way of life.

Some koi ponds are very contemporary in design, looking almost like shallow swimming pools in modern landscapes fill with abstract forms and contemporary architecture. Others, however, are intended to more closely resemble ponds in nature, and for all intents and purposes fall into the category of pond landscape design.

One of the things that waterfall landscape design can add to a contemporary style koi pond is a touch of nature that brings a sense of organic fluidity to the scene without departing significantly from the Mentalism that is the essence of contemporary landscape design.

Custom fountains can be built to look like actual waterfalls, or they can have waterfalls flowing into them. Either form is preferable to the stereotypical three-tiered fountain that has become far too commonplace and generic in the world of fountain décor. Our fountains are designed to convey a type of awareness, a certain feeling of calm tranquility that is uniquely personal to the owner. Unless specifically instructed otherwise by our clients, we tend to replace the three-tiered fountains we encounter with something more personal and aesthetically linked to natural realm.

Luxury Pool

A luxury pool offers those who visit its lounge area a sustained impeccable moment of continuous comfort and joy. It is relaxation, exercise, gathering, and contemplation all united in a single structure that blends hardscape, water elements, and softscape surroundings into a special kind of Houston outdoor living.

This is a luxury that you feel rather than brag about, and something you share as a superior experience instead of promoting as a symbol of status. A luxury pool works for the landscape and with the landscape as it simultaneously serves the humanness of people with a practical artistry that adds an elevated value to the living experience of each guest.

Because luxury pools have this tendency to elevate our sense of this seemingly elusive thing we call the quality of life, they are often designed to strike the eye with a visibly elevated design. It is by no means a hard fast rule for us, but we often do find ourselves building a pool with multiple levels. Many times there will be a division between the shallow end of the pool and the deeper end, with a feeling of descending, as if on stairs, into the cooler comforts of water that goes over your head.

Frequently a multi-level luxury pool will also have a spa located at the shallower end. Spas are specified in detail during the landscape master plan stage and are built into the shell of the pool itself. Silent pumps are installed to keep the water circulating, and heaters are concealed to keep it warm. We also install controls to regulate water temperature and flow and lighting that illuminates the water at night with a sense of experience that extends beyond mechanical amenities.

It is necessary for us to frame such a setting with a sense of special surrounding. This is done in three places: the coping, the patio, and the surrounding gardens.

Simply put, a coping is the raised area that looks like a step that travels all around the edges of the pool. It actually works as a step by making a person pause just for a split second as they walk toward the water. Somehow, long ago, people discovered this was a safer and more comfortable way to get into a pool rather than just stepping off a sheer drop-off into however many feet of water was waiting for them.

We pay special mind to building a coping around the pool that works like a mirror to home architecture. There are all types of high-grade materials we can use for this. We also carefully calculate both the width and height of the coping because it works as visual frame that lends symmetry and containment to the otherwise formless nature of water.

In a very real sense a custom patio frames the pool also, and it also works to compliment the architecture of the house. Custom hardscape and patio work is made using any number of materials. Depending on the landscape design that surrounds the patio, we may build something very formal and geometric using flagstone or special blocks sunk into the ground. Or, we might establish a deliberately irregular pattern that mimics natural stone formations and blends gently with surrounding organic softscape patterns.

There are ways, too, that we can make the water itself look exceptional. We bring in a special partner company to install underwater lighting that illuminates our luxury pool from within so as to make it look multidimensional at night. Water jets and falls can also add an even more of a dynamic sense of life and dimension.

Houston Covered Outdoor Kitchen

If you are looking to create a new realm of Houston outdoor living for your family and friends, invest in a covered outdoor kitchen designed and built by Exterior Worlds. These all-purpose outdoor rooms are nothing less than fine indoor living space inverted and transformed into outdoor luxury areas that are constructed with everything a custom indoor kitchen or living room can provide.

In addition to convenient and dependable functionality, we can build your outdoor kitchen with any number of special features, amenities, and luxuries that you desire. Furniture and media systems that you would typically associate with living and family rooms can also be added to your outdoor floor plan in to give your landscape a central hub of fine food preparation, comfortable dining, luxury repose, quiet conversation, and high-tech entertainment.

Many of the features we build into our covered outdoor kitchens are standard, functional features that are essential to the function of the structure. These features designed first and are intended to make the room completely self-sustaining. There is no point in building an outdoor living environment that is dependent on the world inside. Instead, our outdoor rooms are so constructed that it is possible to begin and end an afternoon or evening outside no need to return to the house.

This high-level of convenience is made possible by a wise choice of essential appliances and conveniences.

Refrigerators Rated for Outdoor Use Separate Freezers to give you plenty of storage space Side burners for soups and sauces so you do not have to use us precious stove space for liquids Full-feature ovens Weather-resistant, attractive, stainless steel cabinetry Ice makers Granite or Marble countertops for food preparation Dining room areas Lighting systems and controls

There are also a great many custom options that can be added to any covered outdoor kitchens. Much creative license can be taken here, and the power of that license lies in the hands of you—the client. We want this room to be a room that you feel you personally customized as an expression of your core values, lifestyle, and personal taste. Provided nothing added violates safety regulations of interferes with the functionality of appliances, you practically have free reign in selecting the options that best meet your home entertainment needs.

Side grills for barbecuing on rainy Labor Days, Memorial Days, or Fourth of July Holidays Custom maple, oak, or mahogany cabinets and drawers Living room areas with couches, fireplaces, or fire pits Entertainment systems with the finest audio, visual, and mood lighting you can imagine.

Visualize fine living and ultra-convenience when you picture a covered outdoor kitchen by Exterior Worlds. This is one of the wisest investments you can make in landscaping design and personal luxury living. It is also one of the better ways to improve your property value should you ever decide to sell your home and move on.

Lagoon Pools & Design

Oftentimes, we end up wanting to make everything on the landscape look as much a part of Nature as can as we can. This can be challenging when we built certain structures such as swimming pools, which are by nature very human and artificial environments. However, while we may not be able to alter the basic purpose of a thing, we can change the way it comes across by altering its proportions and appearance. This being considered, lagoon pool designs are some of the most powerful examples of how something inherently manmade in origin can be sculpted to blend with the topography and structures of the earth itself.

From a design-build perspective, lagoon pools are not built any differently than standard and luxury pools. What makes them different is their deliberate departure from the strict linearity that defines most other pool styles. With these other designs, water is strictly contained in a rectangular space or adjacent series of rectangles and squares. The opposite is true for lagoon pools.

This is done to imitate Nature’s apparent boredom with straight lines. Think about it for a moment. Everything you see in nature either goes in a curve or breaks a straight line soon enough with a jagged edge or angular departure from linearity. We want to imitate this progression in lagoon pool design—using free flowing energy to follow a progression that will end up looking like something we would suddenly stumble on in some remote island paradise.

Curved lines and rough edges are the key to making this work. We want our lagoon pool design to flow across the ground like water coming into an inlet from the sea. This means we have to forget about this whole mathematical concept of a radius. Radii are used in other constructions to establish symmetry and clear boundaries. We don’t want any boundaries here, but something instead that speaks of freedom, destination, and a sense of rest after a long and harrowing journey.

Most lagoon pool designs have a tropical look to them due to the strong connection between lagoons and islands in the South Pacific. There is a derivative form, however, based upon bodies of water in Central Texas. We call this our Hill Country theme and has been developed especially for Houstonians whose jobs are in Houston but whose hearts are in Austin. For such individuals, we landscape their property with a Hill Country ranch theme, and we shape the pool to look like the ponds and tanks you would find in the open spaces of rolling Texas hills.

Disappearing Fountains

True to their names, disappearing fountains bring water up to dance around the landscape for a bit, and then quietly disappears into some mysterious hidden place underground. These special custom fountains are intended to be highly unique and personal structures tucked away in secluded parts of the yard. Their uniqueness makes them favored centerpieces of any morning garden, reading area, or meditation space built just for the homeowners themselves.

The primary difference between a disappearing fountain and some other fountain design is the absence of a basin. Instead, the water flows into a below grade pit. The elevation of this pit is set by carefully measuring the slope of the surrounding landscape. We may have to dig out a lower, level area in order to get to just the right needed for optimal water flow.

Once the water starts pouring out of the fountainhead, it flows down the sides into this catch pit and filters through the cracks between special materials used to line the pit. If we want to set a European tone, we can spread gravel here, like we did in the morning garden project found in our case histories. If we want a more wilderness feel, stones will be substituted for gravel.

Maybe too we can integrate this form into more intentional and linear landscaping designs, such as Italian gardens, or even the highly abstract realm contemporary landscape design. In these instances, bricks or pavers are often laid down in the catch pit..

In such instances, one thing is common regardless of the materials ultimately chosen. The water disappears. It is that simple, and in that simplicity lies the true beauty of this fountain. Watching the water simply flow between stones or bricks or even slabs of hardscape seems to produce almost a hypnotic effect on the mind.

But what happens to the water then?

It goes into an underground chamber through hidden slots under the filtration layer. A remote pump circulates the water through the system; pushing it back to the fountain head and returning it to the surface world to continue the visible portion of its cycle. The actual fountain itself can be anything from a geometric structure, a mythological deity, or something rudimentary like a piece of pottery or special urn that has been drilled out to accommodate the flow of water.

What we ultimately choose here will be based to a large extent on considerations such as how it looks in relation to the backdrop of the home, how it fits into garden landscape design, and how it juxtapositions itself with nearby hardscapes and outdoor buildings.

Iron Wall Planters

For the perfect—and practical—finishing touch to your landscape design, consider custom ordering iron wall planters from Exterior Worlds. Our planter boxes, built to last and built to your specifications, could add the final element to the overall look and atmosphere you want to create.

Iron wall planters can be made in any shape, color or style, thus becoming the just-right accessory for your yard. While the typical shapes are square or rectangular, we can fabricate them to fit any nook you might have on your wall or fence. Even the really oddly-shaped places.

With colors, you have a wide-ranging palette that goes from authentic metal hues to cheery colors. Your options of styles run the gamut of decorative periods from a Greek or Egyptian motif to today’s whimsical patterns.

We make our iron wall planters from aluminum, steel or copper. For ease of maintenance and durability, we can galvanize or powder-coat them. And in consideration of those plants that do not thrive in wet soil, we are careful to drill holes in the bottom for drainage purposes.

These planters are particularly fitting when they match or accentuate other iron elements you have already chosen. Exterior Worlds has used ornamental iron, also called wrought iron, for such structural uses as garden gazebos, doors, door panels, screens, window grilles, handrails, banisters, balconies, column capitals, copings, pilasters and outdoor water fountains.

For purposes of functional ornamentation, our clients have also used ornamental iron for landscape lighting fixtures, wrought iron driveway gates, gate ornaments, door knockers, door handles, hinges, curtain rods, andirons and fireplace tools, gratings, partitions, benches, outdoor tables and other custom furniture.

Accents and accessories include such ornamental iron pieces as antique wrought iron rosettes, mirror frames, sculptures, gargoyles and wrought iron wall elements.

While we have found that iron pieces work in almost any landscape, we think wrought iron goes especially well in gardens that have a particular theme. A perfectly placed ornamental iron arbor enlivens and accentuates a Mediterranean landscape design, for example. In a similar way, a wrought iron trellis seems to belong among the riotous colors of an English garden design. A formal landscape design, with its gravel paths and meticulous manicuring, invite the straight lines and embellishments of wrought iron garden gates and wrought iron fences done in a Baroque pattern, for example.

Ornamental iron has a long history as a decorative art, beginning in The Middle Ages. Even though today in our landscape products, true wrought iron has been set aside in favor of mild steel and electric welding is preferred over the hammer and anvil, it is as if it is possible to still see how fire transforms a metal rod into its many amazing contortions. With ornamental iron, the heat and history are palpable. And the artistry is made solid and immutable.

Ornamental iron establishes an enduring beauty within your landscape design. Let Exterior Worlds draw upon our wealth of ornamental iron works, including custom-made iron wall planters, to integrate these inspired decorative trimmings, finely executed artistry and scrupulous designs into your landscape.

Since 1987, Exterior Worlds has provided discriminating clients in the greater Houston area with high-end landscape services, including custom iron works. Call 713-827-2255 for a consultation.

Entry Gardens

An entry garden creates transition between indoor living space and outdoor landscape designs. Such a transition areas serves as a compliment to the architecture of the home while simultaneously introducing one or more specific themes in a particular residential landscape design project. This helps establish the sense that manmade structures are united in essence with natural forms.

Popular features of these entry gardens (both formal and informal) can include any number of decorative and landscape elements. Water features of some sort are almost always installed. Anything from a small natural pool to a custom fountain can be installed to add a sense of tranquility to the moment. Sitting areas are almost always created within the enclosure to make the area not only a transitional space, but a destination space for visitors. Outdoor lighting is always installed in these areas so that people can enjoy the intricate hardscape designs interwoven with dynamic expressions of sculpted greenery and emerging life.

The first thing to establish when designing an entry garden is the location of the structure. Any entrance to the front or rear of a house is typically the preferred location(s) for installation. Side entrances are also ideal locations because they are typically found in areas too narrow for larger landscape design projects, but nevertheless too sizable to lie fallow and undeveloped. Driveways are another ideal location for entry gardens. Adding shrubs and flowering plants between the motor court and the house, or between the motor court and the front yard, goes a long way in making an otherwise flat hardscape sculpture more harmoniously blend with surrounding softscape

The second thing to keep in mind about entry gardens is the absolute necessity of establishing a strong sense of entrance. There are a number of ways to do this, such as narrowing the pathway that leads into the garden, or lining the walkway with special vegetation or even trees. In most cases, however, we simply vary the elevation for people approaching the garden, changing the grade of the landscape itself to create a sense of drama and arrival.

Because most formal garden design is done in the back yard, entry gardens in the front yard tend to be quite a bit more formal than the ones located behind the home. This is due to the fact that front yard entry gardens are transitioning outdoor space into the indoor space of the home. As such, they must be built precisely to scale in geometric patterns that directly introduce the more significant themes of home architecture.

By contrast, entry gardens in the back yard can tend to be much less formal and free form. It is not necessary for these forms to directly reflect the appearance of the house, but rather simply compliment it with a sense of correspondence or balanced counterpoint. This gives the garden services design expert a great deal of creative license in planning an area that will be both aesthetically pleasing and offer a special type of comfort zone to residents and guests.

Antique Wrought Iron

Exterior Worlds often uses antique wrought iron in landscapes to meet the needs of our sophisticated clientele. We believe that antique wrought iron pieces convey an international point of view while revealing a preference for the past.

Antique wrought iron also affords an opportunity to put a one of a kind element in your landscape design. It works perfectly in spaces of all sizes—at the front door, on a private patio, in a large garden, at the entrance of an estate, just to name a few of the places we have used them.

Wrought iron has been around for centuries in just about every country in the world. You can find antique wrought iron pieces from Belgium, for instance, such as a two-foot tall roof top finial. From Egypt, we’ve seen planters, wall sconces, side tables, and chandeliers. The ornate wrought iron balconies in intricate florals from Argentina are remarkable.

English ironwork for the gardens is always a pleasure. Including the hardworking—such as a wrought iron garden arbor from 1940’s England or an antique circular wrought iron tree surround with bench seating, made in the early 1900s. The quirky—an English heavy cast iron door knocker in the form of a fist that holds a laurel wreath, as an example. And the magnificent—fence railing that actually once stood in Regent’s Park

Other historic wrought iron stock includes wrought iron gates, garden furniture, garden arches, transoms, wrought iron panels, iron window grills and wrought iron grates. And this list only begins to tell the story.

We have found that antique iron hardware and artifacts create distinction in any of our landscape designs. It does so in two ways—by adding a structural surprise and heightening the visual pleasure. We have incorporated it into new construction for our clients; also renovation projects, as a finishing touch to outdoor spaces such as outdoor kitchens and deck designs, and as a singular garden structure. Aged wrought iron works well in outdoor and indoor spaces, for residential or commercial landscapes.

If you want a custom piece, we can help you find design firms who can make specialty architectural wrought iron pieces using old iron. When making their custom orders, many of these craftsmen will use hand forging techniques to further buoy the sense of authenticity.

When they can’t find what they’re looking for, some of our clients have bought or ordered reproductions of a classic architectural element. The beauty of this option is that it provides you with the one of a kind element you seek, and yet still gives you the convenience of tailoring it to any restrictions you might have—size, for example.

Over the years, Exterior Worlds has found that aged wrought iron can be used in any landscape design—as a solo focal point, an accoutrement to a hardscape, as a conversational element in an outdoor gazebo, an exclusive accessory in an outdoor room, or a decorative accent on a wrought iron fence, for example. It helps define your open space by filling it with imagination, heart and history.

Ornamental Iron Gates

At Exterior Worlds, we think ornamental iron gates present an opportunity to express your own style. The entrance to your property, yard or garden, ranging from the minimal to the grand, communicates something quite basic about you and your lifestyle.

With gates, you can make a statement. For instance, the openness of ornamental iron gates indicates a certain willingness to share. Conversely, solid gates provide security and privacy while conveying a sense of mystery. A garden gate painted in a bright color says something bold.

The decorative art of ornamental iron, which came into its own in The Middle Ages, requires great skill to arrive at its often amazing embellishments. Over time and in nearly every country of the world, artisans and craftsmen have come up with the many intricate motifs. You can find ornamental iron twisted and shaped into the refined intricacies of the Renaissance, the flamboyancies of the Baroque and Rococo periods, the playful designs of Art Nouveau and the geometries of Art Deco, to name a few. Simply put, there are few limitations imposed upon the design possibilities of wrought iron.

In choosing the gate to greet them upon each and every arrival home, we encourage our clients to consider four of the fundamental design principles: proportion, scale, harmony and emphasis.

• Proportion is the ratio between the size of one part to another. We still use the most pleasing formula developed in ancient Greece which states that the ratio of the smaller section to the larger section should be the same as that of the larger section to the whole.
• Scale is related to proportion. It refers to how the size of one object relates to another object or to the space in which it is placed. With gates, you want it in scale with your fence, for instance, and the entire fencing in proper relationship to your yard and home.
• Harmony occurs when all the elements of your landscape design blend together. When using ornamental iron, you can develop harmony by repeating the same pattern in your gate, your ornamental iron fence and ornamental iron railing, for example.
• Emphasis within landscape design vernacular means creating a focal point. Perhaps you want to use your outdoor fireplace, a custom outdoor water fountain or custom swimming pool as your point of interest. In these cases, a decorative iron gate that opens onto these elements would play a supporting role.

In addition to the aesthetics of an ornamental iron gate, you have some practical considerations as well. For instance, over the years, Exterior Worlds has offered this suggestion for dealing with Houston’s expansive soil—if you have a gate with a knob, the locking mechanism may not line up properly because the ground has shifted. A sturdy arch over the gate can serve as a frame that keeps the gate square and plumb with the knob’s receiving plate.

Ornamental iron gates provide both fluent expressiveness and convenience. The right gates can enhance the overall look of your landscape. They add élan and elegance to your property while securing you, your family and your home.

Pond Landscape Design

Pond landscape design can work as a style in its own respect or function as part of a more complex landscaping design such as a Japanese garden or tropical garden. In either instance, pond landscape design occupies a central position to all or part of the yard. Centrism helps contribute to the feeling that one is looking at a natural scene instead of something merely manmade. Ponds in the wild lie in the center of clearings or high in the mountains between peaks. Centrally locating a pond in the middle of your yard gives it this same sense of convergence and isolation.

The water should be surrounded by ledges and greenery in order to draw attention to it. This is often overlooked by amateur landscapers who attempt pond design without the proper awareness needed to correctly build such a deceptively simple structure. Any body of water that is merely a depression in the ground not only looks unnatural, but it also looks depressing. You have to add a vertical element and some lush, green vegetation transforms to give it a sense of life and vitality.

An even more powerful sense of vitality can be added by constructing a waterfall that runs into the pond. Running water carries with it a powerful calming influence on the human mind. Waterfalls are constructed using special silent pumps and all natural materials (such as small boulders or limestone) to make them look identical to those found in the mountains.

A pond should either have an earth bottom or a gunite bottom covered in a layer of earth that makes it look natural. Since most residential pond landscape design deals with a limited amount of space, the earth bottom ponds we normally find in municipal parks and large corporate campuses are impractical for a back yard element. They tend to silt up too quickly and present serious flood threats when heavy rains suddenly strike.

A concrete bottom covered with a natural substance like earth or rock works much better for residential landscaping. It is more reliable from a functional and emergency drainage perspective, but it is concealed behind all natural materials.

Landscape lighting is absolutely vital to pond landscape design. At night, no one can see the water or the greenery surrounding it without some sort of lighting. Special down lights can be mounted all around the bank to ensure that the surface of the water is clearly visible from all vantage points. If a waterfall is present, we typically install underwater lights behind the falls to illuminate the flowing water from within and create a prism of colors as the light refracts outward in all directions.

Outdoor Landscape Design

Outdoor landscape design always revolves around the home. This is due to the home’s preeminence on the landscape as the symbol of lifestyle and values. In every aspect of design the home must always be respected from every vantage point in the yard. The residential landscaper makes certain of this by concentrating on developing two types of forms: hardscape and softscape. Softscape refers to organic forms like trees, gardens, and grasses. Hardscapes refer to anything inorganic and constructed.

Softscape elements are the first things that normally come to mind when we think of outdoor landscape design. While vegetation technically occupies less space than structure, its importance is nevertheless absolute. This is because the whole point of Houston outdoor living is to experience Nature from the vantage point of a comfort zone. Choosing the right plant materials is essential, because whatever vegetation is planted must be done so deliberately that less becomes more at the end of the day.

Gardens are perhaps the most popular organic elements and exist in a wide range of types that establish entire themes for landscaping. French gardens, parterre gardens, Italian gardens, and English gardens are essentially formal designs. Others styles, like modern and contemporary types, are fundamentally abstract and custom in nature.

In a similar manner, flower beds add diversity and vibrancy to the landscape by introducing a spectrum of colors as accent decor. Flower beds are particularly useful in areas too small to host a garden. Small fountains, statues, and the areas of around trees are ideal locations for either annual or seasonal expressions of color.

Other types of vegetation can be used to establish boundaries and accent essence in outdoor landscape design. Hedges can function as small organic walls that separate gardens from lawns and courtyards from open spaces. Open outdoor rooms can even be built with hedges and shrubs as walls.

The second aspect of outdoor landscape design is hardscape plans. While many people may think that only solid, horizontal surfaces like patios and driveways are hardscapes, the reality is that any structure constructed in a yard is technically a hardscape form.

Hardscape construction consists of a blend horizontal and vertical structures that contributes a livable element to the natural forms of the landscape. Great care must be taken by the landscape architect to design these forms to scale and to use materials that compliment architecture and surrounding vegetation. Everything must look harmonious and balanced when the final project phase is complete.

Hardscapes are typically constructed from stone, concrete, or iron. Wood is technically classified a hardscape too, although wood is somewhat unique in that it is an organic substance derived directly from nature.

Many hardscapes perform a primarily functional role in outdoor landscape design. These structures include patios, driveways, and walkways. Others structures are clearly more decorative in essence. Architectural walls help frame outdoor rooms, entry gardens, and courtyard. Swimming pools look more inviting with a coping rising up from the patio. Iron fences, arbors, and trellises can add either Old World Formality or rustic motif to any landscape.

Houston Garden Services

A convenience that we offer the Exterior Worlds’ client is the unbundling of services. For example, you can hire us to perform garden services only. Beautiful gardens afford you with an ever-changing, ever-constant source of pleasure—the exchange of light and shadow, the interplay of textures and colors, the wondrous creatures of nature that are attracted to gardens, such as butterflies, birds and dragonflies. Additionally, gardens can be quite sensible. When it comes time to sell your home, a well-maintained landscape makes your house stand out to prospective buyers, giving you an advantage over other houses in your market.

Our garden services contract involves hiring us to perform the countless tasks required of a multi-layered garden, excluding the maintenance and care of lawn and turf. This type of contract works well for clients who have a maintenance crew already in place with whom they are pleased. While this crew does the upkeep of the grass areas, however, they do little—or cursory—care of the garden beds, bushes, trees and hardscapes. Hence the need for an Exterior Worlds’ garden services contract.

At Exterior Worlds, we believe in delivering unique, personalized services while creating landscapes and gardens filled with natural hospitality and warmth. An extension of that philosophy is that a regular, well-executed landscape maintenance plan helps you to protect your landscaping investment.

A short list of our garden services includes:

• Prune annual flowers to maximize the bloom cycle.
• Train roses, vines and other climbing cultivars on garden archs, garden arbors and trellises.
• Trim ground covers and shrubs. We work conscientiously to maintain the original intent of the landscape design.
• Mulch. It is important to not put too much mulch on the base of plants. While it is terrible for the plants, we unfortunately find that it is a common problem that we often have to correct for new clients.
• Pull weeds, as needed.
• Cover plants in advance of freezes.
• Treat for fungus, weeds and insects. Fungicides and insecticides are applied two to four times per year. Exterior Worlds is licensed by the Texas Structural Pest Control Board, License # 12015. (Texas Structural Pest Control Board, P.O. Box 1927, Austin, TX 78767-1927. 512-305-8250.)
• Fertilize and feed. For a Houston landscape, flowers require fertilization every six weeks.

Impeccable and wide-ranging landscape services are our specialties. Exterior Worlds is a full service, high-end landscape design and maintenance firm, in business in Houston since 1987. We employ all our years of experience for each design project and each landscape maintenance contract. Our residential clients live in the Memorial Villages, Bellaire, Tanglewood, River Oaks, West University, and other communities in the greater Houston metropolitan area.

After spending the time and money on your landscape design and installation, it makes perfect sense to protect it and make sure it develops as intended. And that’s where a maintenance program such as discussed here can be used. We provide the level of intricate care that a sophisticated garden needs and deserves. Further, joining our garden services with a pre-existing turf crew is cost-effective for you and makes the best use of your time.

Rock Landscape Design

The purpose of all landscaping is to mold the natural world into a comfort zone for outdoor living. To do this, you have to unify the manmade with the natural. Because stone is abundant throughout the world in every natural environment, rock landscape design offers the most effective unifying element between human architectural and organic presence.

The most powerful characteristic of stone is its sense of absolutes. Its stark, unspoken reality makes it ideal for constructing any type of boundary that subdivides a property into areas of special interest. Architectural walls, columns, dry set stones, veneered walls, and rock borders can all be used to set aside special areas for conversation, recreation, and relaxation.

Rock landscape design also greatly compliments to any landscape element that features water. This is especially the case for natural swimming pools and ponds that are intended to emulate remote mountain lakes. Stone can also be used to cover the gunite bottoms of these ponds to make them look natural and to conceal the silent pumps, aerators, and drains beneath the water that maintain the pristine appearance of the pond.

Swimming pools can also be greatly enhanced by rock landscape design. Stones that are used to construct decorative copings make the pool appear more natural in origin. Stones are also ideal building materials for swimming pool patios because they provide a safe surface area to walk on with wet feet, and because they blend so very well with surrounding garden design. Stone copings around custom fountains always add an Old World or Classical touch to the water’s edge.

Driveways and walkways can literally be transformed by rock landscape design. Many people prefer to have a stone motor court rather than a plain concrete drive simply because it adds beauty to their front yard. You see such driveways a lot in front of homes built with very formal architecture styles. Around less formal houses, where an all stone driveway may look ostentatious, rocks places on either side of a concrete slab are normally all you need to dress up an otherwise plain hardscape.

Any purely decorative elements can be magnified with rock landscape design. Areas typically adorned with vegetation can be further accentuated with a less-is-more approach to stone placement. A tree with a flower bed around it, for example, will appear even more distinguished if stones encircle the flowers. Wooden arbors look more natural with decorative boulders standing on either side of their entrances. Entry gardens look sublime with large decorative boulders that highlight garden elements with a special sense of presence under outdoor lights.

Landscape Master Plan

When we create a landscape master plan for a client, we develop a detailed drawing of the intended design. This gives clients a realistic visual reference drawn to the exact scale of the completed project. If necessary, we can use 3D modeling software to create a real-world simulation for the client to see. In either case, though, the level of detail our drawings contain make them much more sophisticated than a CAD drawing or architectural sketch. Our plans show clients the essence of we are proposing, and it gives them greater opportunities to make changes before we actually begin working in the yard.

The landscape master plan is also essential to successful construction of landscape architecture. One of the most overlooked aspects of landscape design is grade elevation. Grade elevations are extremely vital to the success of front yard and back yard landscaping. They are frequently overlooked by less experienced landscape designers or by yard service companies claiming to specialize in landscaping. Grade elevations work hand in hand with drainage systems that are vital to the lives of plants and to the integrity of outdoor structures. Without proper grade elevation, the yard can flood very quickly.

The first landscape elements that we plan are hardscapes. This is because hardscapes normally comprise between 60-70 percent of landscape design. Some of the more common hardscape designs are as follows:

• Driveways are often expanded to provide more parking for guests when they arrive.
• Swimming pool remodeling is undertaken to properly compliment the appearance of the house and to effectively blend with surrounding hardscapes and garden elements.
• Walls and fences are added to to create boundaries and to expand ones sense of space within the yard.
• The location and style of courtyards and outdoor buildings are planned out with careful attention to the smallest of details.

It is very important to draw these structures correctly— and to draw them to scale— in order to ensure that home architecture is respected, and that the landscape design, when completed, frames a theme of unity, balance, and reciprocal relationships. Successfully developing the inorganic portion of the landscape master plan then paves the way for the development of the many organic creations that constitute the essence of Houston outdoor living and which give the landscape its ultimate sense of energy and life force.

• Gardens are designed by drawing up planting layout plans.
• Tree management services like root barrier maintenance, root pruning, and even tree planting are itemized in the landscape master plan
• Plans for hedges, flowering plants, and special grasses are indicated where appropriate.

Finally special decorations and ornamentations are added to the landscape master plan. Fountains, statuary, and trellises are planned out in relationship with organic designs such as gardens and hedgerows. This creates a feeling that the natural has united itself with the manmade in total acceptance of architecture and décor.

Garden Design

Garden design needs to be done by professionals with a sound understanding of geometry and experience in hardscape design. This is because so many areas like patios, fountains, outdoor kitchens, and courtyards appear magnified and vibrant in the power of a living presence. An extensive knowledge of plant species variety is also needed, because a garden needs much more than colorful flowers to add experience and value to Houston outdoor living.

This is because greenery, not color, is the foundation off all types of garden design. A professionally designed garden is always characterized by layered, varying shades of green. This upholds a three-dimensional aesthetic and makes the vegetation stand out more prominently. The residential landscaper uses many different plant species to create this effect, including hedges, special grasses, ground cover plants, and even small trees.

Color is then introduced in two ways. Ground cover plants with colored leaves (such as begonias, impatiens, salvias, pansies, petunias, and cyclamen) are used for annual color. Seasonal colors are created by flowering plants.

The location of the garden will be determined by its size and style. Larger gardens normally occupy a central position either in the yard. These styles include traditional parterre gardens (though not necessarily their derivatives), French gardens, Japanese gardens, and English gardens.

Other garden designs, such as Italian and Mediterranean work better as linear support elements next to homes, walls, fences, and alongside walkways. Contemporary and modern gardens are planted to counterpoint the abstract forms of contemporary architecture with a touch of the organic. They also are planted throughout modern landscapes to add life to the otherwise sterile intellect expressed through contemporary landscape design.

The ultimate decision on what garden design to develop will always based on relationship. Every major landscaping element must be harmoniously complimented by the vegetation we plant; otherwise the entire landscape theme will appear broken and out of sync with itself. Elements such as the home, both large and small trees, and water features of any kind must look enhanced by the selection of plants and the form they are arranged in.

Vegetation is also needed around any major hardscape features in order to unity these structures with a natural presence of life. This is especially true around anything made from brick, concrete, or wrought iron. Garden design softens the appearance of these often harsher forms and settles them into what ultimately becomes a pristine setting.

There is also a very essential, albeit unseen aspect to garden design, and that is irrigation and drainage. While it is a fact that Houston experiences a very humid climate, rain is unpredictable and sporadic. You simply cannot depend on the rain to water your plants. You need a professionally designed and automated irrigation system in the yard in order to ensure the viability of your vegetation. This system must be completely concealed in order to avoid diminishing the aesthetic of your property.

You also need a concealed drainage system to protect the yard from flooding during those times when it does rain. If your area begins to flood, this drain system will get the water out of your garden and into the storm sewer system. Again, only professionals trained in advanced landscape architecture should be trusted to design such a system effectively.

Garden Landscape Design

The first thing we do in developing a garden landscape design is select the best location for a garden. We look for an area that will appear complimentary to the home from multiple points of view, so that regardless of whether you are looking at the garden from your living room window, or admiring it from the patio of your custom swimming pool, the garden will add a unique and special vitality to the moment. Such locations often include the bases of fountains, areas around outdoor buildings, patios, fences, and masonry. Many of the larger, more formal garden designs like Parterre gardens can even center an entire landscape, serving as organic focal point around which all other landscape design features are designed.

The actual style chosen for a particular garden landscape design is based on two factors: geometry and intended theme. Because any house occupies the position of central importance on the property, it is necessary to begin every residential landscape project with a systematic architectural analysis. No matter how eclectic a house looks, its architecture is based on the same basic geometric forms seen in every other structure. It is only the manner in how these forms are combined that determines uniqueness. Our garden landscape design professionals pinpoint these forms and plant vegetation in corresponding patterns. These forms will either directly reflect architectural geometry, or they will compliment it with correlative counterpunctual designs.

Another consideration that weighs heavily in our choice of style is the theme of the landscape master plan. If we are looking to create an abstract, conceptual aesthetic, we will plant a contemporary or modern garden. If we want to create a sense of meditative repose, we can build a Zen garden or Japanese water garden. Formalism is best developed through traditional garden designs, such as French, Italian, and English Gardens. Mediterranean and Tropical gardens can be planted if we want to create an atmosphere of the romantic or the exotic. Custom gardens that are comprised of blended elements from all styles can work to establish a strong eclectic tone in the landscape.

The heart and soul of garden landscape design are the plants and flowers growing within the garden. Every design, regardless of origin, depends upon a blended presentation of greenery and color. Different shades of green must be used in order to avoid looking flat and two dimensional. A layering of lighter shades of green with darker tones creates a much deeper, more multi-dimensional perspective. Different shrub species, ground cover plants, and special types of grass our use to create these layers of shade and tone that range from an almost lime-green to a dark green that almost looks black in certain light levels.

Once this foundation of green is laid, color is then be added in appropriate amounts, depending on the style of garden we are developing. There are a few designs, such as the Parterre Garden, that use practically no flowering plants at all. Others styles like knot gardens feature a plethora of herbs that flower seasonally and add a different spectrum to the yard every 3-6 months. Still other forms like French, Italian, and especially tropical gardens, allow for a much more creative and liberal use of color.

Pool Landscape Design

Pool landscape design creates a focal point for the backyard.
As important as trees and garden design are to a property, backyard landscapes need more than just greenery to function as effective outdoor living environments. Houston residents who rely upon their backyards for home entertainment and special events need a focal point for activity that offers an equal amount of aesthetics as well as functionality.

A well-constructed swimming pool creates just such a hub for activities and recreation. It represents a special environment connected to all surrounding environments. Regardless of whether or not guests every get in the pool, they will invariably be drawn to the patio, lounge furnishings, and outdoor rooms constructed around its perimeter.

Pool landscape design unites home architecture with surrounding landscape.
Many pool contractors recommend a shape, size, and style of swimming pool that based on the belief that the pool can function as its own independent reality within the landscape. There is kernel of truth in this perspective. Certainly the pool is quite possibly one of the most unique things you will ever find in a back yard. However, the viewpoint that the pool is so unique that it exists separate and apart from its surroundings invariably proves limiting and unworkable from a global aesthetic perspective. Because of its prominence, the pool’s appearance has a powerful subliminal effect on the overall appearance of the surrounding property. If the pool is too large, or if its shape directly clashes with the architecture of the home, it causes a tangible sense of emotional discomfort simply because its appearance does not harmoniously blend with the vegetations, structures, and house that it ideally should be working to compliment.

Pool landscape design differs from pool design in that it deliberately bases the size, shape, and geometry of the pool on the architecture of the house and the surrounding landscape theme.
The home itself is the most preeminent structure on any landscape. It represents the personality and lifestyle of its occupants, and, like it or not, establishes the tone of the landscaping theme in general.

While this may seem a needless statement of the obvious, reflect if you will, for a moment, on all the pictures you have seen over the years that show a swimming pool whose size, shape, and geometry clash with the aesthetic of the home in a similar fashion. Invariably, when a new homeowner buys the property (if they buy it), they immediately notice the angst such a scene generates and look for an expert in pool landscape design who can do something about it.

Our pool landscape design team bases the size and geometry of the pool on both home architecture and surrounding landscape elements.
By this we do not mean that the size of the pool has to mathematically correspond to home square footage. What we do mean is that the shape and style of the pool have to be carefully designed in the landscape master plan so that the pool design compliments the form and proportions of the home.

The geometric shape of the pool does not have to exactly correspond to that of the house either, but it should in some manner or the other compliment it, at least in an indirect manner, without any sense of clash or discord. Custom patios and special copings will then be added at the end of almost every project because these structures are essential design and hardscape elements that function to aesthetically harmonize the pool with surrounding organic and structural forms.

Covered Outdoor Kitchen

One of our recent projects involved the construction of an outdoor kitchen. This was something of a challenging construction project because this portion of the yard lies below street level. We would not have discovered this problem were it not for our systematic methodology we follow in developing a landscape master plan, and for the 3D imaging software we use to model our design.

The survey of the property and subsequent model we adopted showed us exactly what grade elevations we were working with, and they provided us with the data necessary to develop a workaround for the problem. Rather than building the room in a less convenient location and risking ruining the aesthetic of the landscape, we simply installed a special pump to siphon out waste water into the drain system.

One of the most unique features of this outdoor kitchen was a custom smoker that we built inside it. Our clients like to smoke meats as much as they like to cook traditional fare, so this added convenience allowed them to do either or both all from the convenience of a central location.

We also added side burners that were specially designed for foods such as heated sautés, soups, chili, and other similar foods can all be prepared off to the side. This frees up a great deal of stove space for meats and vegetables without forcing the cook to change location to check on sauces or sups.

Because many outdoor events occur after sunset, it is very important that an outdoor kitchen have plenty of light. In addition to typical room lights we also installed a task light for cooking. The luminance of this fixture is so superb that the finest textures and colors are clearly visible even on dark, cloudy nights.

A number of specialized appliances were also installed in this outdoor kitchen so as to make it so fully operational that no one ever has to run inside. A sink and instant water heater were installed and linked to the hidden pump that removed the waste water from beneath the structure. We also added a refrigerator that was rated for outdoor use. It is equivalent in operability to indoor refrigerators, but specifically built to withstand the climatic and temperature variables that come with outdoor use.

We wanted to do more than simply make this structure a place for cooking food. The Pesek’s wanted us to create for them an outdoor living experience that represented the epitome of décor and amenity. They requested that we install custom mahogany cabinets and drawers. These helped to better establish a sense of décor, and they also provided excellent compliments to the architecture of the home.

A fireplace was built in the center of one wall, and fine furnishings were added to create the feel of an outdoor living room. The view of the landscape is superb from this seating area, because the outdoor kitchen is built at a terminal view point for the whole yard. The swimming pool lies in a direct line of site from its entrance and can be conveniently accessed at will.

Finally, to top of the sense of fine Houston outdoor living, we installed a fully operational sound system and entertainment system. Now, the Pesek’s can prepare a full course dinner for special guests and enjoy a movie, CDs, or, on cooler nights of the year, a warm conversation by the fireplace.