Whole-Property Landscape Design
One scope, one price
Six quotes for one property are usually six different projects, which is why they cannot be compared.
Six quotes for the same property are almost never six prices for the same work. Each contractor has drawn its own boundary, made its own assumption about what somebody else is doing, and priced accordingly, so the cheapest number is usually the one that assumed the most. Comparing them is not comparing like with like.
What falls between quotes
What falls between quotes is always the same list: grading, drainage, spoil removal, access protection, services in the ground and the make-good where one trade meets another. Each is genuinely somebody else on paper, and on the day it is genuinely nobody.
Those items do not disappear when they are unpriced. They arrive as variations, which is the most expensive way to buy anything.
Why a fixed price needs a fixed design
A price can only be firm against a scope that is actually defined, which is why the design comes first here. Pricing an intention produces a number that moves, and a number that moves is not a price.
What we will not do
We will not quote a price per square foot for a property nobody has looked at. Access, slope, existing conditions and how much has to be removed change the figure more than the size of the lot does, so a per-foot number would be misleading often enough to be dishonest.
We would also rather tell you a phase is not worth doing yet than sell it.
Questions people actually ask
Why will you not give a ballpark over the phone?
Because the honest range is wide enough to be useless, and a number given casually is remembered as a commitment. Somebody standing on the property can be specific in a way a phone call cannot.
Is one company more expensive than hiring trades directly?
On the headline number, sometimes. Against the finished total including variations, coordination and the work that fell between scopes, frequently not. We will not claim it is always cheaper, because it is not.
What makes a price change after it is agreed?
Things nobody could see: rock, buried structures, unrecorded services, a soils condition. Those are named as risks at the start rather than discovered as arguments later.
The rest of the guide
Whole-Property Landscape Design, one question per page.
- Whole-Property Landscape Design: the complete guideThe hub page: what it is, the sequence, and what one company changes.
- The order of the workNot a scheduling preference. Every stage decides where water goes for the one after it.
- Four contractors, and the seamsThe normal way a property gets built, and the specific places it comes apart.
- Services before concreteThe cheapest decisions on the whole project, and the ones most often skipped.
- Drainage decides everythingThe unglamorous half of the budget, and the half that is still right in ten years.
- The pool inside the planThe shell is rarely the problem. Where it sits almost always is.
- Phasing a whole propertyAlmost nobody does it all at once. Doing it in the right order is what makes that cheap instead of expensive.
- What a 3D model settlesChanges on screen cost an afternoon. The same change after a footing is poured costs a demolition.
- The handoverA landscape is a system somebody has to run after we leave. Being told how is part of the work.
- Where this falls shortThe page most companies in our position do not write.
Tell us about the property
Send a few lines about what you have and what you want. We will tell you what we think it takes, what order it should happen in, and whether we are the right company for it.