How to Achieve a Luxury Landscape

Santa Cruz Landscaping has been creating unique, beautiful and luxurious landscapes for homeowners for over thirty years. Many of the landscapes are fanciful in nature, bringing to mind the storybook cottage, fairy tale imagery, and functional landscapes that are delightful to behold. If you want to achieve your own luxury landscape, there are several elements to consider.

Features of high-end landscaping typically include a very well-manicured lawn, exotic or unusual inorganic features, and natural elements that enhance the terrain. These features include:

• Tiered garden spaces to create a sense of elevation in flat areas
• Colored stone gravel or colored mulch to add more color to a monotone yard.
• Statuary or fountains as focal points.
• Topiaries and hedges trimmed to perfection with shape and/or form.
• Outdoor patio and entertainment spaces
• Unique and decorative lighting solutions

One or more of these components are configured into luxury landscapes, with a focus on making a space very elegant and charming to behold.

While you certainly can choose different luxury features to incorporate into your landscape around your home, most consumers prefer to hire a landscape designer. The designer is usually given total control over a project and allowed to take measurements and examine the terrain. Then the designer will create a couple of different designs from different viewpoints to help homeowners choose something that really speaks to them. It is akin to hiring an interior decorator, except that this designer works entirely with your existing outdoor space.

If you choose one of the designs or a few different aspects from multiple designs, the landscape designer then begins the task of creating what you selected. You never have to lift a shovel or scoop dirt or mulch. The landscape designer works as or with other landscaping professionals to create and complete the design features you want.

If you were to take on this project yourself, the results will be very telling. Not everyone has the ability to trim hedges into fantastical shapes or into a labyrinth. Not everyone can successfully add a Japanese water garden and make it look like it’s a completely natural part of the landscape.

You are free to try, but the results may be mixed. Additionally, you would be doing all of the work yourself, and it is a lot harder to create tiered gardens than it looks. A professional designer can bring many of the elements you love together and make it look as though those elements have been there and been together all along.

An example of this is the “fire and water” types of landscaping, where an eternal gas burning strip emits dancing flames and a steady flow of small waterfalls lines the wall behind it. Santa Cruz Landscaping has created several of these exquisite features for both commercial and residential properties.

A luxury landscape should always be balanced, like a fine piece of figural and sculptural art. As such, you may want to consider a balance between quiet and serene and the functional and entertaining.

Think “cabana” versus outdoor BBQ pit with chaises. In the former, you might just relax and enjoy the peace and quiet. In the latter, there is a lot of stimuli to take in, from the conversation with others sharing that space to the smells from the BBQ pit. If you have a lot of outdoor space, you might want both, but they should be on opposite ends of the yard.

Color using flowers is another example of creating a sense of balance. A lot of color should be balanced with minimal color. Your designer can show you how the effect of a lot of color in one area balanced with minimal color in another area “feels” right and looks perfect to the human eye.

A pool is not typically considered luxury, unless that pool is equally as extraordinary and unique as the yard around it. An infinity pool with a waterfall, for example, is definitely a luxury. A standard in-ground pool usually isn’t luxury unless the deck or yard around it makes the pool the focal point.

If you want a pool in the yard, but you don’t want the pool to take over the yard, the landscape designer can find several beautiful options to incorporate this into the design. Select pool models and pool shapes help make this component more luxurious than most pools typically are.

The beautiful warm weather of Santa Cruz, CA means that you can be working on your luxury lawn all year round. Add different details until you finally achieve the amazing look you desire. A designer can meet with you and begin designing the yard of your dreams. Within a few weeks the approved plan goes from paper to ground. All it takes is that first step of contacting the company.