The full extent of the work was completed. The paving contractor added additional curb appeal to his scope of work along with resolving drainage issues and also fixing the foundation leak. Having this work done passed additional value on to prospective buyers with resiliency peace of mind, resulting in the quick sale of the house. Further, the homeowner hired the professional to work on the newly purchased home improvements, too.
It is not all about the flowers
The experience of most contractors and designers suggests there are no typical scenarios, and the simple replacement of a walkway could be as it appears (but rarely is). The presented observations of the landscape designer are not reserved to their profession alone, but these can be applied by many experienced home improvement professionals, landscape contractors, paving specialists, renovation contractors, and maintenance services. It is the linking of the anomalies—from the deteriorating health of the rhododendron to detecting the stains on the foundation and the eaves trough—that led to the result.
Left to a single trade to resolve, unobserved or not, the overlying issue would have progressed into additional cost and home decline. If/when caught eventually, the problem could have been corrected before the work on the walkway was completed. Many television shows have been created on the premise that home improvement disasters occur due to issues that exponentially get worse from being missed, misdiagnosed, covered up, or ignored.
The promise of environmental resiliency
Many professionals, including landscape designers, make the mistake of assuming their work simply involves placing the correct plant in the right place according to the design. Although true (to a certain degree), an experienced professional will admit the design solutions in landscaping cannot be resolved with perennials and border plants alone. This skill is added to the design consciousness integrated into residential landscape design but not hinged on it.
It is the widened scope of the education of a landscape designer, typically through the exposure of landscape architecture, grading, and social science, that both horticulture and awareness in building standards and construction can link the person to place. This association to nature is the promise of environmental resiliency.
It is not the architect or the urban planner’s vision alone that provides the designed connection of person to place. Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language made these observations decades ago, and the relevance is not lost: “A house feels isolated from the nature around it, unless its floors are interleaved directly with the earth around the house.”
All professionals, designers, and tradespersons alike are an integral part of the home improvement industry that encompasses the home living experience. No one architectural design element is considered disconnected from the other. The recent trend of material and spatial blending and the seamless integration of the interior to the exterior have never really been out of fashion. The expanded use of materials in colder climates, including weather-resilient fabrics available in multiple patterns and the use of folding glass panels, now allow for the integration of the interior (features) to interact with exterior (seasons/climates). Consider the expanded exposure of television segments on outdoor living, with designers providing ideas to bring the indoors to the outside. These elements stitched together by landscape professionals expand the possibilities for contractors to wade into outdoor renovations, adding heightened value to a project. Creative processes that allow the fashionable integration of designer solutions mean potential payback and value-added services for the contractor’s clients. Developing the budget with the integrated design adds new pressure on a project.
