There’s more to a home than the building itself. Your lawn, gardens, driveway, paths, pool, retaining walls and trees are all vitally important in the street appeal of your home and how you live in it.
This is why the landscaping components of your site should be considered and designed at the same time as the house.
The Wholistic Approach
At Rosewood Homes, we’ve always taken a wholistic approach to our custom-designed homes. We consider how to best achieve our client’s needs and desires in the development of their site – beyond floorplans and façades.
Builders, designers and architects often plan a custom-designed home around a client’s design brief, focusing on the floorplan, finishes and façade. This often means that the house design will be manipulated to work within the planning requirements of the site, ‘cutting and filling’ to suit the site’s contours.
Unfortunately, this means that the way the home is positioned on the site and the floor levels of the house are often not fully explored.
Floor levels
While floor levels of a new home on a relatively flat site usually don’t require much contemplation, with sloping or terraced sites it’s critical that floor levels of the new home are specified to best suit the site and the landscaping required.
If site levels vary over the site, detailed consideration of the house floor levels and site landscaping are even more important.
Floor levels on a home will directly influence:
- Excavation – the ‘cut and fill’ needed, such as the requirement for excess material to be removed from site or for fill to be imported
- Any ‘drop edge beams’ that may be required in the home’s construction to contain excavated fill
- Any split in floor level through the house itself
- Retaining walls required for areas of ‘cut’ or areas of ‘fill’, or the use of batters to manage level transitions in the yard space
- How stormwater is to be managed and dissipated from roofs and soft surfaces
- The driveway gradient and paths around the house
- Any external steps or ramps to manage transitions in yard level
- The street appeal of the house
Incorporating Landscape Design
When understanding the correlation between house levels and these factors, the importance of floor level consideration through the design process becomes obvious.
We believe this is best achieved through our custom design process where the home design complements detailed landscape concept design documentation. This is why Rosewood Homes has developed a working relationship with the respected EcoDesign team, so our clients can discuss their landscaping intentions with experts to understand how the landscape design of the site will work with the home design.
This helps our clients to better understand implications of the proposed house levels on the development of the rest of their site. The house design and landscape concepts can be adjusted to achieve a better, wholistic design. By investing in minimal costs to prepare landscape concept plans, clients can ensure the best outcome for their site.
Rosewood Homes is now offering landscape design consultation and preparation of landscape concept plans through EcoDesign as an optional extra with our Custom Design Process.
Contact us
Contact us for more information on our Custom Design Process and how the landscape design consultation can ensure the design of your new house complements landscaping works that not only suit your site, but will also help make your home even more wonderful to live in.
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