This happy top-o-the morning looking bloke is David Hocker. He’s a landscape architect (Hocker Design Group) and a pretty good one at that. Besides winning an American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) National Honor Design award and a ASLA State Merit Award in the same year, he has the great privilege of working with yours truly on the modern infill project I have been showcasing here for the last two years.
I’ve mentioned that this project would be wrapping up in the next two months and that things are going to start coming together really quickly. Today, I thought I would introduce you to David Hocker and the Hocker Design Group, and show you just one teeny tiny detail that is awesome and worthy of your attention. The chamfered retaining wall edge detail!!! (GASP!!)
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Do you see it?… It’s right sexy isn’t it?!?
Lets look at it again, but closer, more intimately
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Get In My Belly!!
For those of you who might not know what you’re looking at or why I think this is a slick detail let me explain. Normally when you have a change in elevation, you have to install a retaining wall to that the dirt on either side of that wall can exist at different elevations. That means you generally have to look at the top of the wall and to be quite honest, they rarely look all that wonderful. When the job is a modern style project, seeing the top of the wall is even less desirable and there are only a handful of ways you can deal with this. In David’s landscape design, he has detailed this chamfered edge to the tops of all the exposed retaining walls so that the landscape growie material can come right up to the edge of the wall. This gives us a nice clean visual edge while leaving just enough wall peeking out that the guy mowing/ trimming the ground-cover can keep the edge tidy.
Maybe it’s easier to see in a detailed drawing, I just happen to have one for you…
See what I mean? It’s not a particularly tough detail to execute but it makes a huge design statement. The concrete subcontractor has only just started to form up all the retaining walls on the front of the project where we have this detail in place. I wanted to showcase some of the before pictures because in 2 months, you won’t believe how good the after pictures will look.
A lot of attention is just now being focused on the exterior and particularly the built portions of the landscaping. One of the really exciting features is the pool that is in the center courtyard. The courtyard deck and pool are completely integrated together using large format bluestone slabs that turn down into and cover the entire pool.
But I shouldn’t get ahead myself, that’s coming next week. I can barely restrain myself I am getting so excited!! Hopefully you’re not getting burned out on these posts, of course I find it interesting – it’s what I do. Hopefully (besides seeing something that looks pretty good) you can learn something and take it away for use in your own projects. That’s really the point of the sexy retaining wall detail – it needs to be used and loved by others.
Cheers,
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