Landscaping in Redmond, WA

Because two of the three things a drainage system needs are in short supply there. A French drain works by collecting water and carrying it, on a consistent fall, to a point where it can discharge — and valley-floor ground is flat, which limits the fall available, and it sits close to a high water table, which limits how deep you can usefully trench before you reach saturated soil. Neither makes drainage impossible, but both mean the discharge point has to be established before anything is designed. This is one of the few places in our area where we will occasionally say a drain is not the right answer and regrading is.

Real, and worth planning for rather than working around. Redmond Ridge and several of the newer developments operate associations with genuine architectural standards covering front-of-house appearance, fencing, hard surface materials and often tree removal. Submissions are usually straightforward but they take time, and the worst version of this is discovering the requirement after materials have been ordered for a spring start. We ask whether the property is in an association on the first visit, produce the specifications needed for a submission, and schedule the build behind approval. Older Education Hill and Grass Lawn streets generally have no association at all.

More structure and fewer unbounded areas than most people start with. On a lot of a third of an acre or more, the common failure is a very large lawn with a narrow planted border, which reads as empty and gets used only around the edges. What makes these gardens work is dividing the space: a paved area sized properly for how you entertain, a lawn or turf area with a defined shape and purpose, deep planting that gives the boundary presence, and a genuine route connecting them. The buried work — drainage, irrigation, lighting conduit — should be designed across the whole plan even if the build is staged over several seasons.

It affects scheduling more than it affects the finished price. Redmond is the furthest of our regular Eastside markets and crossing SR-520 adds real time to every visit, so we tend to schedule Redmond work in continuous blocks rather than in stop-start visits — which is better for the project anyway. What offsets the travel is that access here is generally excellent: material can be staged near the work and a machine can reach the back garden, which removes the largest cost variable that Seattle city lots carry. You get a fixed written price before work starts either way.