Retaining Walls in Redmond, WA

Generally the material, the finish and colour, the height, and where it sits relative to the frontage and the neighbours. Redmond Ridge and several of the newer developments operate genuine architectural standards, and a retaining wall along a visible boundary is precisely the kind of structure they exist to look at. In practice this is not an obstacle to a good wall — it is a scheduling item. We produce block samples, elevations and a dimensioned layout suitable for a submission, and plan the build behind approval rather than assuming it will be waved through.

Usually several, and it is worth resisting the instinct to run a single continuous face across the whole garden. A long uninterrupted wall reads as infrastructure rather than landscape, concentrates all the drainage into one run, and gives you a single large terrace that frequently ends up under-used. Breaking the fall into two or three shorter runs at different levels, with planting between them, produces more usable area, spreads the drainage load across separate discharge points, and looks considerably better from the house. It also tends to keep each wall under the height at which additional requirements kick in.

Rarely for structural reasons, and where one is proposed down there it is worth asking what it is really solving. The valley floor is flat, so there is generally no slope to retain — but the ground sits close to a high water table, which means a low wall is sometimes being used to raise a planting bed or a terrace above ground that stays wet. That is a legitimate use, but it is a drainage decision wearing a wall's clothes, and building the wall without answering the drainage question just relocates the problem to the other side of it.

The same way as anywhere — perforated pipe at the footing, twelve or more inches of clean free-draining rock against the face, geotextile keeping soil out of that rock — but sized for a bigger catchment. That is the specific Redmond consideration: a wall at the bottom of a half-acre upland lot is collecting the surface and shallow subsurface water from all of it, not from a city-sized garden. Undersizing the discharge is the failure mode here rather than undersizing the wall, and it shows up as water finding its own route around the end of the run.