Frequently Asked Questions

A custom landscape design is tailored to your desires and reflects your lifestyle. It gives your home and garden a professional curb appeal and increases your property value. A well-planned landscape design averts duplication of efforts and prevents costly mistakes caused by ignorance or improper planning.

Here is a useful article that will be of your interest – 5 Reasons to Hire a Landscape Designer.

Landscape Design is priced as an estimate of hours worked. Depending on the scope of the project and the complexity of the site, it can range anywhere from 20 to 40 hours or more.

In our experience, landscape design is better suited to projects that start with a blank slate, that involve one or more hardscape areas, that require several planting beds and that have a construction budget of 30K or more.

Projects with construction budgets between 15K-30K are better suited to smaller areas of a larger landscape, or modest garden renovations that can be serviced with Garden Consults.

Note that we do not work on projects with construction budgets less than 15K.

After we first connect over phone / email, we send you a ‘New Client Questionnaire’ that helps kindle your thoughts regarding your landscaping goals and gives us a sense of what you hope to achieve in your garden. You can also fill this questionnaire online by clicking on the link above.

We set up a complimentary phone consultation, over which we determine if the project is best suited to a garden consult or a garden design. It is ideal to have the filled questionnaire sent to us a few days ahead of the phone session, so we can prep for it.

We use iMap to look up your address on King County’s GIS maps to do a quick site analysis. The questionnaire also gives us an idea of your wants and needs and helps us match it with a budget range.

If an in-person site visit is required to evaluate the property for design, we charge $125 for a 1-hr site visit and consult. We then submit a design proposal for your perusal.

After the design contract is signed and a start date is agreed upon, the design phase takes about 4-6 weeks, depending on client’s availability for design review and making decisions.

As we evolved over the past decade, we realized that we are much more efficient when we work on projects within a 15-18 mile radius of our location. Geographically, our service area spans south of SR-522, west of Avondale Rd, east of I-5 and north of I-90. Mercer Island is included in our service area as well.

That said, there are small exceptions like the area around Woodinville High School or Bothell downtown, where we have completed several projects. So, when you reach out to us or fill out our contact form, do specify your address. We can determine if it fall within our service area.

Over the years, we have built solid working relationships with local landscape contractors, who install our gardens. We oversee the installation / construction and manage the project right from inception to completion to ensure that the goals of the design are met. Attention to detail and keeping the client updated at all times is our motto.

Absolutely. You may choose to install all or part of the design yourself. Letting us know this at the beginning of the design process would be advantageous.

We can put together ideas that are DIY and provide a sequence of logical steps to be followed during installation. For e.g. you may want to dig for irrigation piping and finish that, before putting in a gravel path in the side yard. Or, order/install the plants only after the soil has been amended. Following the proposed sequence reduces duplication of efforts and saves time.

We accept Cash, Check and Credit Cards (Master Card and Visa only). Note that there is 3.5% PayPal service charge that gets added on all credit card payments.