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When River Oaks comes to mind, you think—upscale, discriminating, high quality, impeccable taste, attention to detail. These qualities are also applicable to the River Oaks landscaping services supplied by Exterior Worlds. With more than 20 years of experience in landscape design, project management and maintenance contracts, Exterior Worlds understands the wants and desires of a discerning clientele. To each landscaping project, we bring the highest integrity, creative and quality work using experienced contractors, and a commitment to customer service.
River Oaks Landscaping: Experienced Personnel
Our reputation begins and ends with our people. Throughout our 20 year in business, we have developed solid partnerships with top artisans and contractors in Houston and the larger Gulf coast region. What that means to a River Oaks landscaping project is that you get the benefit of these long-term working relationships. It can be seen in a smooth construction process in which scheduling, creativity, problem-solving and the use of proven construction standards make for a cohesive progression. You can also see it in the results: the personal touch, the artistic final details, inventive nuances, ingenuity and innovative solutions. Just the kind of landscaping discriminating clients expect.
Additionally, our landscaping crews are the best in the business. They are well-trained, detail-oriented and experienced, traits they put to work on each task, whether it is a straightforward seasonal color change or a complex construction project.
Exterior Worlds offers a full gamut of landscape services, starting with installation and ending with maintenance. Centrally located within minutes of Interstate 10 and the 610 loop, we are able to quickly reach all the close-in neighborhoods like River Oaks, the Memorial Villages, Bellaire and West University. Additionally, we can support our clients in remote Houston suburbs and nearby towns such as Sugar Land, Carlton Woods, Katy, The Woodlands and Richmond-Rosenburg.
River Oaks Landscaping: Codes and Permits
An important, add-on value of professional Houston landscape designers is a complete knowledge of local codes and permits. In fact, no landscape design project is truly effective without this characteristic. For instance, if you are building a new house or remodeling your present home, you need to consider the permitting requirements for lot coverage, tree preservation and removal, drainage systems, storm water retention, pool design, landscape lighting, fencing and gates. Exterior Worlds stays up-to-date on this region's frequently changing codes, rules, regulations and procedures to make sure your landscaping project goes smoothly.
If you work with a Houston landscaping company who is unfamiliar with local codes, regulations and permitting, it can negatively impact your budget. Construction can actually be brought to a halt until all the proper procedures and protocols are followed. Any resulting fines and penalties, reinstallation requirements to bring the project up to code, and the time required for re-inspection can become quite costly.
River Oaks Landscaping: Resources
We believe the best resource for Houston landscaping materials is knowledge and experience. Exterior Worlds requires that all our designers are experts in the tools of the trade, such as plants, stone, European tiles and antique planters. Because of our tenure in the business, we have connections that provide our clients with products that are trustworthy and proven—and will create memorable landscapes. Further, we will not lower our standards even if it is more cost-effective to use sub-par materials. In this way, we achieve our mission to meet and exceed our clients' expectations.
We were contacted by a family in River Oaks who requested that we completely remodel their pool and the yard that surrounded it. They wanted to get rid of the pool's “L-Shape” construction and have it redesigned with a curved, linear structure and rounded ends. They also wanted to surround the pool with something very different than the traditional wooden deck or concrete surface. Instead, they wanted a stepping stone patio that would look like a part of Nature itself and cause the pool to look more like a part of the landscape.
Stepping stone patios of all sorts are common in landscape design. They are at all difficult to construct. However, creating a french drainage system can often be a challenge depending on the constituency of the soil. Water can create mud between stones and on accumulate on their surfaces, making it unpleasant to walk across the patio after a rain. To make such a structure work as a pool patio, it was necessary for us to build a concealed drainage system underneath the stone elements and use organic material to conceal it. What we did to accomplish this was to pour individual pads of cement that worked as bases upon which to mount the flat stepping stones. We built the drainage system at the level of these concrete bases, and then planted grass between the individual stepping stones.
This concealed the patio's manmade origins, and created the illusion that it was much older than it actually was. The grass looked like it punched through the rocks and established a tenacious foothold in the spaces between them.
We then continued the natural theme by building a walkway out of the same material we used to construct our stepping stone patio. We designed one end of this walkway to hug the side of the pool, functioning as a 30” coping that gave plenty of comfortable pool access, transit space, and an aesthetic link between the water and the land. We were able to curve its direction by cutting the stones into pie shapes, then fitting them together by hand individually. Once completed, the walkway arced around the sides and ends of the pool, ran through the end of the yard, and passed under a garden trellis into a sculpture garden.
This sculpture garden also played an important role in this landscaping project. It too, involved the construction of a new hardscape. Because this was a formal gathering designed around a European garden theme, we built a circular flagstone patio off the end of linear walkway. This became the central seating area, with smaller, diagonal pathways radiating at angles back to the side doors of the home. Between these smaller pathways, we constructed a water fountain that was shaped like a fireplace, but that had a lit waterfall falling into its rectangular brick basin. At night, guests can sit in a semicircle facing the fountain and enjoy the ambiance of a lighted waterfall.
Throughout the property, we planted a variety of flowering plants and ground cover around our stepping stone patio and walkway. Jasmine was used profusely to control erosion and to prevent encroachment from weeds. Monkey grass was also used for weed and erosion control. Agapanthus and golden globes were used in places near brick walls and around the perimeter of the stepping stone patio to help color its borders with seasonal blooms. We also added height and elegance to the landscape with Italian cypress, and planted Camellias throughout the property to provide blooms for the winter season when other seasonal were dormant.