Landscaping in Shoreline, WA

They introduce a constraint most Seattle-area gardens never encounter: view protection. The Innis Arden community has long-standing covenants that address preservation of views between properties, which in practice means planting height and tree work are subject to community rules rather than being entirely your own decision. That cuts both ways — it limits what you can grow tall, and it also protects your outlook from what a neighbour might plant. Before designing anything with height in Innis Arden we establish what applies to your property, because a screening scheme that solves a privacy problem and creates a covenant problem helps nobody.

For most of the city, yes — and the practical consequences are identical. The same glacial till underlies both, so flat Shoreline lots hold water through the winter for exactly the reason flat Wedgwood and Maple Leaf lots do: water reaches the hardpan, stops, saturates the topsoil above it, and has nowhere to run. The differences are in scale and in the exceptions. Lots here are larger, which means drainage systems are sized for a bigger catchment. And the western bluff above Richmond Beach and the Boeing Creek ravine corridors behave quite differently from the plateau in between.

It deserves the same caution as the Seattle bluffs, and for the same reasons. Bluff-edge ground along the Sound carries looser material than the plateau behind it and is sensitive both to loading and to water, so what you build above a slope and where you route surface water become structural questions rather than aesthetic ones. Uncontrolled discharge over a bluff edge, or a downspout running onto the slope, is exactly the mechanism that turns stable ground into moving ground over several wet seasons. We look at where water leaves the property before we look at what goes on it.

Less than proportionally, in most cases, and that is the real advantage of working up here. The largest cost variable on a Seattle city project is not the square footage but the access — a job where every barrow of base material goes through a three-foot gate can take twice the crew hours of the same job with a driveway. Shoreline lots generally have room to bring a machine in and to stage material near the work, so the cost per square foot of a patio or a wall is lower than its Seattle equivalent. Total project cost is higher because there is more ground, but the money goes further.