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Landscape Design · Ballard
A Ballard garden is not a small version of a large garden — it is a different design problem, and the schemes that work here start by accepting that. On a lot of three to five thousand square feet with a hundred-year-old house on it, the back garden is frequently under eight hundred square feet, overlooked from several directions, shaded for much of the day and permanently damp from October. Trying to fit a conventional lawn-plus-border layout into that produces a space nobody uses. What works is more paving than instinct suggests, planting depth achieved vertically, and lighting — because a small garden is seen from indoors far more than it is stood in.
Paver apron and planted strip across the front of a house on an older residential street
What we get called about
Ballard is small lots and good drainage, which is close to the opposite of the rest of Seattle. The typical job here is not holding a slope or fixing a bog — it is making a compact rectangle behind a hundred-year-old house genuinely usable. That means more paved surface than people expect, a turf or lawn area smaller than instinct suggests, and enough planting depth at the boundary to make the space feel enclosed rather than merely small. The one real constraint is access: the older streets have narrow side returns and no off-street parking, so material handling shapes the schedule.
Worth knowing in Ballard
Budget for lighting even if it means a smaller paved area. In a garden this size, seen from the kitchen for eight months of dark evenings, lighting changes how much you get from the space more than another twenty square feet of paving would.
The method
The sequence does not change between neighbourhoods — what changes is the ground it is applied to. Full detail on the landscape design service page.
What you want to use it for, who else uses it, what you hate about it now. Most of the useful information comes out of the second half of that conversation.
Grade, drainage, soil, existing trees and where a machine can get in. This is the half of design that never appears in a photograph and decides most of what is possible.
Where the paved area goes, how big it really needs to be, what the route through the garden is. Getting these wrong cannot be fixed with better planting.
Real products, real quantities, and a fixed written price with the assumptions stated so you can see what is included.
Clearing, drainage, structural, surfaces, irrigation and lighting sleeves, then planting and finishes. The order is the difference between a build and a rework.
What it costs in Ballard
A Ballard design and installation typically sits at the lower end of the $8,000 to $70,000 range simply because there is less ground — but the rate per square foot is higher than a suburban equivalent, because everything is handled by hand and the detailing matters more in a space you see up close. Design fees are credited against the build.
You pay after the project is fully completed.
The estimate you sign is the price you pay.
Spread the cost with no interest.
Covers hardscape work; vegetation excluded.
Local questions
General questions about this service are on the service page. These are the ones that only come up here.
Pave the majority, get planting depth vertically, and light it. Under about four hundred square feet a lawn is shaded by the house and the neighbours, stays damp, wears through where people walk and needs a mower stored on a lot with nowhere to store one. Replacing it with a properly sized paved area, raised planters that give real soil depth without taking floor space, a planted vertical surface on a fence or wall, and low-voltage lighting consistently produces a garden that gets used — which is the only measure that matters at this scale.
By solving two or three specific sightlines rather than attempting to enclose the whole space. You cannot screen a small city garden from every neighbouring window, and trying produces a dark box. What works is identifying which views genuinely bother you — a particular window, from a particular seat — and interrupting those with a narrow upright tree, a trellis panel or a planted screen in exactly the right position. Overhead matters too: a pergola over the seating area does more for the feeling of privacy than an extra foot of fence, because most of what makes you feel watched is being looked down into.
Yes, and it is worth building into the design rather than discovering during the build. On a Ballard lot where everything reaches the back garden by barrow through a three-foot gate or through the house, heavy elements become disproportionately expensive — a large boulder, a substantial stone wall, a big single-piece feature. So the design shifts toward what can be carried and assembled on site: smaller units, timber, planting-led structure. Planned from the outset that is not a compromise; discovered halfway through, it is an expensive redesign.
Frequently more so than on a large one, and the reason is that there is no room for a mistake to hide. On a quarter-acre lot a badly placed patio is simply one part of a big garden; on seven hundred square feet it is the garden. Getting the dimensions right — the clearance behind chairs, the width of a route, the depth of a planted edge — is the difference between a space that gets used every evening and one that gets looked at. Those are decisions best made on paper, where changing them costs nothing.
Serving Ballard and surrounding neighbourhoods
Ballard Avenue · Sunset Hill · Loyal Heights · Whittier Heights · West Woodland · Adams · Crown Hill edge
98107 · 98117
Recent work
HardscapingView full sizeSegmental block walls terracing the grade at the front of a modern building, with a stone column, handrails to code and a paved approach — commercial hardscaping, where the walls have to take footfall as well as soil.
Retaining WallsView full sizeA wall run the whole length of a fence line to win back a flat strip of garden. Ballard lots are narrow, so the width this recovers is width the garden genuinely did not have.
WalkwaysView full sizeA side return too narrow for a full path. Large slabs floated in washed rock give a route through and let the ground either side carry on taking water.
Artificial TurfView full sizeArtificial turf pinned into a brick paver border so the edge cannot lift or curl. The grape trellis and the raised planter were part of the same job.
We come out, look at the ground, and put a fixed written price together. No deposit, and it does not change once agreed.
Free estimate
Three minutes on the form. We reply during office hours, Monday – Friday, 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM, and we come out and look at the site before quoting anything.
Or call (425) 533-9734
Thank you — we have your details. We reply during office hours, Monday – Friday, 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM. If it is urgent, call (425) 533-9734.
