Master Long-term Designs
30 Jan, 2007 By: Jamie J. Gooch LDB SolutionsThe February issue of Landscape Management will cover the benefits of designing master plans. Here’s a sneak preview.
A master plan, one which takes into account the client’s future needs, is often installed in many steps over a number of years. This not only benefits the client from a budgeting standpoint, it also ensures the finished landscape will have an integrated, cohesive, feel.
“It allows you to show clients how ideas relate,” says Rick Doesburg, president of Thornton Landscape, Maineville, OH. “Instead of a pool, you might find out they really want an overhead structure and an outdoor kitchen. The master plan shows them how all their outdoor spaces and uses can function together.”
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Landscape design-build professionals benefit from master designs as well. It breaks the project up into more manageable pieces, and can allow you to focus on the design, not the budget. It can be used to stretch the client’s imagination, showing them what is possible with an integrated design. It also means building future business with a long-term client.
Part of that future business could be maintaining the landscape between each phase of the long-term project. Maintenance costs must be explained at the outset of a project, and that is especially true for multi-phase projects.
If the customer doesn’t understand what the maintenance cost is, then they may not maintain it,” says Miles Kuperus, president of Farmside Landscape & Design in Wantage, NJ. “The project will lose the design intent in two or three years if it’s not taken care of.”
Master designs can also speed installation by sequencing work to maximize efficiencies, such as pouring footings for a future backyard deck the same day you pour concrete for a side patio. And they can help eliminate tearing out work that was done a few years before in order to accommodate something new.
And finally, long-term plans help to illustrate scheduling or zoning issues on a project before they’re emergencies.
To learn more about master designs, be sure to check out the February issue of Landscape Management magazine.
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