What do you need to know about your home when you design your landscape? To understand how to design your landscape, you need to know how your home functions in terms of drainage and irrigation. These things are second nature to a landscape designer, but you must be aware of things like drainage and sunlight on your property i.
Well, some things are just second nature to someone who's been doing landscape design, so I don't always discuss them with my client necessarily. Things like where the sun comes up in a yard. Usually when I look at a property, I'm going to know. I would say that the things you want to know about your house are certainly functional things, certainly very basic details like drainage and sunlight and lack of water or the well system. If you have town water, are you going to put in an irrigation system in or are you going to be around to water the plants all the time? Do you have water restrictions or droughts in the area or do you get a lot of snow? These are all fundamental. I do not discuss those things because they just are given.
What I do discuss, most clients really do not know. They think they know. Many clients think they know what they want. But they really do not know exactly what they want. What you have to do is help them to get to the point were they can see it, they can feel it, they can taste it almost. Just because the home has a certain architecture, that does not define what you are going to do. That's the starting point. Your house could be a certain type of architecture whether it is contemporary or traditional or whatever it might be. Someone else can live in the same home and have totally different expectations and requirements for how it's going to be. Some people are English garden people, some people are very studious and want perfect lines. Some people want contemporary, some people want traditional. There is also lighting to consider in your landscape. What makes it right for your home is whether it works and fits. If you are a heavy person, you do not wear horizontal stripes. If you are a very thin person you do not wear vertical stripes. That is just a kind of common sense, unless you are trying to look heavier or thinner.
The same is true with a piece of architecture or home. Do you want to have a koi pond in front of your house that you can sit and watch. Do you have a porch and do you want to spend time in a porch? Do you want to have privacy on a porch when you are sitting on the porch? These are the kind of things that you want to talk about and these are the kinds of things you need to know about your home. The problem is that you don't think about them because you are not a landscape designer. In a landscape, it should have a lot more creativity. My clients do not pick and choose things in general. They don't go out and pick. Sometimes they want to, but they really don't have the wherewithall or the expertise or the time or whatever it is to pick those things. People think they do and some people are very good at it.
You need to know what you are trying to accomplish with your landscape and how to accomplish it. You need to figure out if you need any improvements or you want to enhance your front door or you want to enhance some architectural detail on the house. It might be a nice architectural detail that the right plant or combination of plants could be lit up at night and bounce off that to draw a lot of attention to work well with it. Do you need to soften the roofline? Do you need to hide the car port or the garage or whatever it might be. Do you want to draw attention away from your neighbor's house when you come up? There are just good design components that you want to use to enhance the house. You want to soften the house. You want to make the house feel like it has been there for a long time in the landscape, not just plants stuck in front of your house.
