01
Outdoor Living
Terraces, kitchens, fire and water. Built as architecture, detailed to survive the humidity.
Landscape Architecture · New Orleans
Landscapes
That Breathe
Horticultural architecture, outdoor living and architectural lighting for private, hospitality and institutional clients across the Gulf South.
A Louisiana site is a hydrology problem wearing a garden's clothes.
We survey before we draw. Elevation, subsurface drainage, canopy shadow across four seasons, and the salt line the last surge left in the soil.
Everything after that — the grade, the stone, the planting, the forty-two fixtures aimed by hand after dark — is consequence. A garden that fails here fails at the ground, not at the plant list.
One crew. One contract. Six disciplines that never leave the site to wait on another trade.
9a–9b
Hardiness zone
14
Weeks, demo to lighting
42
Brass fixtures, aimed by hand
06
Disciplines, one contract
01 — Selected Work
Six gardens,
six hydrologies.
Private estates, a coastal property and a civic terrace, from Uptown to the Mississippi shore. Each drawn to the water before it was drawn to the eye.
02 — Project in Focus
Audubon Place
Uptown, New Orleans. Fourteen weeks from demolition to the first night the lighting came on.
The lot came to us as a fine house sitting on nothing. Good bones, no grade, no drainage, and a lawn that held water for two days after a summer storm.
We took it back to soil before we drew a bed. Selective demolition, laser grading to move water off the terrace and away from the foundation, then the hardscape spine — a stone rill running the length of the garden with a fire terrace at the far end. Planting went in around the structure, not the other way round.
The lighting is the part clients feel and cannot name. Forty-two low-voltage fixtures, every one aimed after dark, on site, by hand. A scheme drawn at a desk is a guess.
Book a site review- Scope
- Demolition · Grading · Drainage · Hardscape · Planting · Lighting
- Duration
- 14 weeks
- Fixtures
- 42 low-voltage, brass
- Materials
- Lueders limestone · Basalt cobble · Unlacquered brass
- Specimen
- Quercus virginiana
- Stewardship
- Maintenance covenant, ongoing
03 — Practice
Six disciplines,
one crew, one contract.
We do not subcontract the parts that decide whether a garden survives its third summer.
02
Landscaping
Planting design for 9a–9b. Specimen sourcing, soil rebuilding, and a plan for year twenty.
03
Lighting
Low-voltage architectural lighting, laid over the planted volume and aimed on site after dark.
04
Maintenance
A stewardship covenant, not a mowing contract. The same crew that built it keeps it.
05
Demolition & Grading
Selective demolition and laser grading. Water leaves the terrace before anything is planted.
06
Haul-Away & Delivery
Our own trucks. Spoil out, stone and specimens in, on our schedule rather than a broker's.
04 — Process
Four movements,
survey stake to tenth spring.
The sequence is load-bearing. Each step underwrites the next.
01
Discovery
We survey before we draw. Elevation, subsurface drainage, canopy shadow across four seasons, and the salt line the last surge left in the soil.
Topographic survey · LIDAR point cloud · Soil panel
02
Design
Plan drawings extrude into planted volume, then the lighting is laid over it. Every specimen is chosen for a zone that runs 9a to 9b, humidity that does not relent, and a client who will look at this bed every morning for twenty years.
Planting plan · Grading · Lighting · Irrigation
03
Craft
One crew holds the site from demolition to the final aim. Stone is set dry before it is set wet. Nothing is planted into a grade that has not been proven with a hose.
Hardscape · Planting · Fixtures · Commissioning
04
Growth
A garden is not finished the day we leave; it is barely started. The stewardship covenant keeps the crew that built it on the property through the years that decide what it becomes.
Stewardship · Canopy management · Seasonal renewal
05 — Journal
Field notes.
Horticulture, material, light, and building in a subtropical floodplain.
06 — Site Review
Forty-five minutes
on the property.
With the principal. We walk the grade, the drainage and the light. No charge, no obligation.
Month
Slots open Fully booked Crew on site
Step 1 — Choose a day
Site reviews run Tuesday to Saturday.
Step 2 — Choose a time
Confirmed
You will get a confirmation by email with the arrival window and the principal's direct line. If the weather turns, we call you — a grade walk in standing water tells us nothing.