The project featured in this ad just won both a grand and an excellence award in the Colorado Landscape Contractors competition. Click here to see the ad up close.
Award-Winning Landscape
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Here is a sketch of a landscape design I did for a very unique property. This land was a little piece of untouched prairie until a couple of years ago, up against the flatirons with killer views, north of Chautauqua Park in Boulder. The project was a collaboration with the developer, the architect, and myself, from the earliest design stages. It is a spec home that will be on the market very soon.  Landscape Design Plans for Boulder Flatirons Residence The landscaping involved bringing in hundreds of tons of stone. It’s on enough of a slope so that we could create very interesting combinations of moss rock walls with huge boulders. A soothingly geometric water feature, paving, benches, and a naturalistic rock garden combine sculpturally alongside expanses of wildflower and native meadow. It’s an example of how to set a very large single family residence into a prairie setting, with harmonious transitions from ultra-modern elements to a natural prairie landscape. If you’re curious to see the finished landscaping, check back in a few months. I expect to have some photos in the late spring, perhaps the end of May. The house itself is extraordinarily modern looking. The architect, Sam Austin, is very creative and does a wide range of architecture. I consider him one of the best architects in the area, and it was a real pleasure to work with him on this project. He designed a rooftop terrace, which provides even more spectacular views. We’re expecting it to be finished in a couple of months. It’s really one of the Denver area’s few remaining spectacular lots with no previous development. Since the recent reworking of the building codes in Boulder, I don’t know whether anyone could even build a house as large as this one anymore.  Pam Prescott's garden design I was gratified to receive this email recently from Pam Prescott, a landscape design client in Boulder, Colorado:
What is particularly interesting is that this was the first of about five or six residential projects done with a team of people, including a developer, an architect, a builder, and landscape contractor. It is an example of the wonderful new homes that can be created when a great team of professionals works in harmony with one another. I think that Pam would make a similar statement about any member of this team. It’s a real tribute to great teamwork.  Prescott garden design: dry stream bed with bridge Essential to this garden are the wonderful perennials, in juxtaposition with beautifully scaled rock formations. A man-made dry stream bed provides grading and drainage, and becomes the focal point of the garden. Equally important, the walkway from the sidewalk to the front door features a combination of natural sandstone slabs and precast concrete pavers which have been tumbled for an antique look. We utilized several drought tolerant groundcovers, including an extraordinary native called “pussytoes” between the stepping stones. Part of the walkway is a bridge crossing the dry stream bed. Following the stream bed further into the property, we see it suddenly becomes part of a group of beautifully wild naturalistic rock formations, set into a plethora of flowering perennials and ornamental grasses. This landscape design project involved a great deal of shaping of the earth, with berming for privacy. As the dry stream bed runs into edges along the berm, it carves away at the base of the berm, exposing a ledge outcropping, as would happen in nature. A beautiful flowering, fruiting multi-stemmed tree on top of the berm provides additional privacy, blocking out both houses across the street, as well as the traffic.  Prescott patio  Prescott garden design: side view It is the front yard that is the primary garden space. It’s an entry garden. We put most of our strong intention and creativity into beautifying the experience of approaching the front door, as well as looking out from the dining room. Often enough, people put so much of their effort into a more private rear garden, and here this is a garden that greets visitors, establishes the ambiance of the property and the house, as we had hoped that this entry garden would do. Even with the privacy features, it is still quite open to the street, so it adds to the whole neighborhood. It’s no surprise that a lot of people stop to talk and to compliment Pam on her garden.  A Denver garden design. This is Bryan Pulte’s personal residence on Polo Field Lane in Cherry Creek. Bryan is a renowned Denver interior designer, and I feel honored to have been chosen to design the landscape for his own home. All of the usable surfaces for people in this garden are decks. It’s a series of cascading decks with wide double-tread steps. In this case we’re using a combination of a Trex synthetic wood surface and red flagstone, both with a reddish hue. It is a hexagonal pattern, with a hexagonal piece of red sandstone in the middle of the hexagonal deck section and then the border is also in sandstone, as shown below.  Hexagonal deck of Polo Field Lane landscape in Denver, Colorado It’s a very small, intensely urban, very private garden, designed around and through preexisting large trees. We planted an incredible number of trees to make a veritable forest of river birch in this tiny garden, creating a glen. We also used a small, spring-like water feature with an unusual grey water-shaped moss rock. By cantilevering the paving out over the water, we’ve created sitting places right by the water. It forms a good size pool of water, where you can sit right by it.  This shows the water feature with cantilevered paving We used ornamentally sculptural furniture, with some big pots both on the paving and in planting beds. We incorporated several kinds of Japanese Maples, including the fine cut-leaf Japanese Maple, and another type of larger growing Japanese maple which is also red-leafed. The picture above shows the triangulation of three different plants that have a reddish hue: one that is grass-like, the larger growing Japanese maple, and the cut-leaf Japanese maple, contrasted with blue spruce. Since I have such respect for Bryan’s artistic sense and design expertise, it is especially gratifying that he has complimented my work with this quote:
 "Breathe in the Garden" Landscape Design This garden in Boulder, Colorado features a vanishing-edge pool with water for swimming adjacent to a naturalistic rock and water feature for plants and fish. There is a series of waterfalls forming a drop cascade of at least nine feet from the master bedroom down to the swimming and entertainment terrace. The terrace has an outdoor kitchen and dining room with views of the Boulder Flatirons. Looking from the dining patio, the swimming pool visually melds with the Boulder Reservoir; you cannot see where one stops and the other begins. A path decends along the water cascade to a quiet intimate viewing patio of both the garden and the grandeur of the Boulder Flatirons. A firepit is perched on the edge of the dining and entertainment patio. |
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