High-quality lighting fixtures are beautifully crafted, built to withstand the elements and last for years of enjoyment. Photo credit: Diana Bergren. As daylight continues to shorten this fall, you can extend the time to enjoy your home and garden with an investment in low-voltage landscape lighting. With a wide variety of fixtures and numerous lighting techniques, [...]
A mortared stone fire pit with limestone coping is integrated into a crazy quilt limestone patio. Sitting around a roaring fire while sipping cider and roasting marshmallows is a great way to enjoy the cool and crisp evenings of autumn. A metal fire pit or clay chimenea can provide heat, but it often ages [...]
The sound of water from an outdoor water feature adds a relaxing, soothing element in a garden. Water features range from simple ones like a small fountain or bubbling rock that is easy to maintain, to pondless waterfalls that require a bit more maintenance, to those that are far more complex, like koi ponds, requiring high maintenance. Here are [...]
Going Green Matters is a free, family-friendly environmental fair where you can spend a Sunday afternoon learning about a greener lifestyle. This year, it will be held at the Woman's Club of Wilmette at 930 Greenleaf Avenue. We invite you to stop by our table to learn about environmentally responsible products and services for your garden. In anticipation of [...]
Our clients enjoy being in their backyard and entertaining outdoors. Three years ago, we integrated a new firepit area with seat wall into their old, small patio. This year, they were ready for a completely new outdoor living space, with much more room, functionality and aesthetic value. Wider, modular steps were built to lead down to the new space from rear [...]
Like many of our clients with newer homes in older established neighborhoods, this family had to make a decision whether to move to a home with a yard more suited to their tastes, or to stay put and customize their landscape from the one they inherited from the builder and previous owners. What they desired [...]
Our clients enjoyed everything about their new home– except the back yard, which was exposed to the street, had only grass, a dull, poured concrete patio installed by the home’s contractor, consistently wet soil, and a large, unsightly catchbasin in the lawn. The wide, poured concrete driveway also looked too plain next to the intricately [...]
The existing patio was crumbling and framed with old, unsightly shrubs. Our clients’ magnificent home, built in 1903 for Gordon L. Pirie and Samuel Carson (of Carson, Pirie & Scott), is built on a steep slope from the front of the house to the back alley. A two-story, four bedroom coachhouse was located [...]