Whole-Property Landscape Design
Services in the ground before the concrete
The cheapest decisions on the whole project, and the ones most often skipped.
Services in the ground are the cheapest work on a landscape project and the most expensive omission. Conduit for lighting, a sleeve under a driveway, a gas line to a future fire pit, an irrigation mainline: each costs very little while the ground is open, and each requires breaking finished concrete the moment it is not.
What should go in even if it is not used yet
What should go in, even where nothing uses it yet: spare conduit across any surface that will be hard to cross later. Then sleeves under driveways and paths, a gas stub where an outdoor kitchen or fire feature might one day sit, irrigation mainline sized for the whole property rather than for phase one, and low-voltage runs to the far corners of the garden.
None of it obliges you to build the thing it serves. It removes the reason not to.
Why this is where phasing succeeds or fails
Most properties are built in stages, and a staged project either has a plan for the whole property or it does not. The difference shows up entirely in the services: with them, phase three is a straightforward build; without them, phase three begins by demolishing phase one.
The cost comparison, plainly
Trenching an extra conduit while a trench is already open is measured in feet of pipe and minutes of labor. Retrofitting the same run means saw-cutting, breaking out, excavating, backfilling, and then matching a concrete or paving finish that has weathered for two years and will not match.
We will not put a figure on either without seeing the property, and the ratio between them is not close.
Questions people actually ask
How do we know what we might want later?
You do not need to, precisely. The design stage lists the plausible futures for each part of the property, and services are run to serve the plausible ones. It is cheap enough that being roughly right is sufficient.
Does unused conduit cause problems?
No. Capped and recorded, it sits there. What causes problems is unrecorded conduit, which is why the as-built locations belong in the handover rather than in somebody memory.
What if the budget will not stretch to all of it?
Then the services are the last thing to cut, not the first. They are the smallest line on the estimate and the one that decides what the next phase costs.
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.
- 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.
- One scope, one priceSix quotes for one property are usually six different projects, which is why they cannot be compared.
- 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.