Paved With Gold

Grand Landscapes Have Grown Beyond Trophies for the Wealthy

The back yard of Kristyn Reed-Salow and Mark Salow after its makeover. (Laura Donoghue - Carlson Design Build)

Kristyn Reed-Salow and her husband, Mark Salow, moved into their new Northern Virginia home two years ago and immediately set about fixing what they saw as a glaring problem: The rear yard had little depth and its lonely deck offered no privacy from the neighbors.

The couple had lived four years in San Francisco and knew the value of well-designed outdoor spaces. They hired a landscape designer, Laura Donoghue, who spent the next few weeks figuring out why theirs didn't work and, moreover, how to fix it. The result, as the photographs at right show, is a transformation from a dull suburban yard to an inviting outdoor living area that is used every month of the year.

"We felt confined by the edge of the deck," said Salow, 40.

"And what was left," said Reed-Salow, 35, "was an alley of grass that was flooding.

The Vienna couple represent a phenomenon that landscape designers, contractors and nurseries have been seeing for the past few years: a fundamental shift in homeowners' relationships with their yards.

Once the province of the wealthy, landscapes that are professionally designed and constructed are becoming mainstream. The garden is the new kitchen. And like a trophy kitchen, it doesn't come cheap. Expect to pay between $30,000 and $50,000 for a typical patio with seat walls, arbor and plantings, according to designers interviewed. For large projects with big-ticket features such as swimming pools and fire pits, the costs can quickly hit six figures. "A hundred [thousand] and up is not out of reach at all," said Donoghue, who works for a McLean company, Carlson Design Build.

In a recent study of the economic impact of the entire horticultural industry, three university researchers calculated that consumers in 2004 spent almost $40 billion on landscaping services, the sector that provides design, construction and maintenance to residential and commercial consumers. (The figure is not broken down to residential alone.) If you add the amount of business this sector generates for other businesses, the sum climbs to $58 billion, by far the largest segment in the $148 billion green industry and one that has grown at an astonishing rate since the late 1980s. It has a sustained average annual growth rate of 6 percent, said Alan W. Hodges, an economist at the University of Florida and one of the study's authors. Growth like this might occur in a new industry such as information technology, but only in spurts. "Rarely do you see it sustained over this period," he said. "This is the kind of stuff we may associate with developing countries like China and Brazil, to see industry growth rates like that."

Designers say they are seeing a cultural and generational shift toward a desire for professionally designed, built and maintained landscapes coinciding with soaring home values, broader acceptance of large mortgage debt and, in Washington at least, a general emphasis on nesting in a threatening world.

They say makeover shows on TV are having an influence, too, even if they don't convey the true time, effort and cost associated with building a lasting landscape.

"I think the desire for beautiful gardens has increased by leaps and bounds," said Tom Mannion, who owns a landscape design company in Arlington bearing his name.

Today's client profile covers "a whole range of people, a whole range of incomes," said Cynthia Ferranto, a landscape architect in Northwest Washington who specializes in residential projects. "When I started out 12 years ago that wasn't the case at all. It was much more clients who were wealthy."

In that time, there has been a shift in awareness that, just as you might call in an interior designer to shape your home inside, you use a pro outdoors, too. "I love to work in the yard, but it's like decorating: You hire a professional," said Jennifer Dengler, 41, whose home overlooks the South River at Thomas Point near Annapolis. She and her husband, Rick, 45, hired Annapolis landscape architect Mike Prokopchak to make improvements to their one-acre lot, including a redesigned driveway and an elaborate pool that features an edge that seems to vanish into the South River and jets of water colored by laser light. "We enjoy it immensely, and it's wonderful for entertaining," Jennifer Dengler said. "I think most of the people who have done elaborate landscaping are in our age group. It just adds a lot of value to the property." Asked if such alfresco living was part of life growing up in Olney, she said, "Not at all."