Landscape Design & Installation in Sammamish, WA

By creating the structure the site does not supply. On a level plateau there is no slope or view dictating an orientation, so the design has to invent one — usually with a change of level of even eighteen inches, a strong route through the space, and planting with genuine depth rather than a border. Those three do more for a flat lot than any amount of ornament. The alternative, which is what most of these gardens default to, is a large lawn with an edge, and it reads as empty regardless of how well it is maintained.

Because a plateau holds water, and everything you might design has to sit on ground that is saturated for a substantial part of the year. Level ground over glacial till has no fall to shed rainfall and almost no downward permeability, so planting drowns, lawns compact and turn to mud, and hard surface bases sit wet. Establishing where water can legitimately leave the property is therefore a design constraint, not a construction one — it determines where the usable areas can go and what will survive in the rest.

They typically reach materials, fencing, front-of-house appearance and sometimes tree removal, which covers a lot of what a full design specifies. Klahanie, Trossachs, Sahalee and most newer developments operate architectural standards. As with any reviewed area, it is far easier to design within them than to design freely and substitute afterwards, because material substitutions change how a whole scheme reads. We ask for the current standards at the first visit and produce drawings in a form a board can act on.

Then it needs establishing properly before anything is designed around it. The plateau carries genuine wetland and seasonally saturated ground, some of it regulated as a critical area with rules on what can be built and how close, and several of these areas look entirely unremarkable in summer. The productive response is usually to design with it — wet-tolerant planting, a route that goes around rather than through — rather than to attempt to drain something that may be protected. Where it is simply wet rather than regulated, drainage is straightforward.