Landscape Design & Installation in Kirkland, WA

By deciding what the view is from before deciding where anything goes. The view that matters is usually from a seat on a terrace or from a specific window, not from standing in the middle of the lawn — and those are genuinely different sightlines. Once that is fixed, the walls get pushed away from the house and kept low so the eye travels over them, rather than one tall wall close in creating a single large terrace and a face across the outlook. It usually costs less too, because shorter walls avoid the height thresholds that trigger engineering.

More than people expect, provided you accept it in pieces. A lot falling fifteen feet cannot become one large level garden without a substantial wall and a great deal of imported fill. It can become two or three connected terraces, each sized for a purpose — a dining area, a lawn or turf space, a planted level — with stairs down one edge so each terrace stays whole. That gives more usable area in total than a single platform and reads far better from the house. What limits it is depth: terracing uses horizontal distance, which on a narrow lot is genuinely scarce.

Both, and the design consequence is the one people miss. On a lakeside lot where material can only reach the back garden by barrow or through the house, the practical effect is that heavy elements become disproportionately expensive — a large boulder feature or a substantial stone wall may cost several times what the same thing costs on an open lot. So the design shifts toward what can be carried: lighter units, timber structures, planting-led schemes. That is not a compromise if it is planned from the start; it is a compromise if it is discovered halfway through.

Yes, and it needs to lead the design rather than follow it. The low ground at the north end sits near the bay and the creek corridors, which means a higher water table, less depth before an excavation meets saturated soil, and less fall to route drainage along. On those lots the first design decision is where water can legitimately go, because that constrains levels, planting choices and where hard surfaces can sit. A few hundred feet up the hill none of it applies and the design is entirely conventional.