Passion and Practicality

If you ask my employees and manage to get an unguarded response, they’ll tell you that I’m an unrelenting pain in the neck – a real tyrant. That’s because I’m always asking nagging sorts of questions such as, “Why isn’t this project finished yet?” or “How much longer is this going to take?” or “Can you speed things up?”

My point in asking, of course, is to let them know on some level that if I were on site and was responsible for what was happening, we’d already be done and moving along to another project, no problems, no issues. Furthermore, our completed landscape or watershape would be a true work of art!

My questions, of course, are somewhat unfair and by implication tend to overstate the effect my superhuman presence might have on a project. But I have no reluctance to come across as a tyrant because, although we are pursuing artistic endeavors, we also need to be efficient enough in doing so that we stay profitable and in business.

I recognize that it is frequently difficult to reconcile art and productivity, but it is something all business owners and managers must do to keep the artistic concepts in our heads moving forward at the same time we’re paying close attention to our clients’ budgets and our own bottom lines. Frankly, working out these balances often keeps me awake at night and, truth be told, is what makes me occasionally cranky on job sites.

ARTISTIC INCLINATIONS

As is true of many of us in the watershaping and landscape trades, my goal is to create unique, dramatic, satisfying works of art for my clients.

I want them and their friends and their families to be awestruck when they walk into a space I’ve developed. And I love the fact that ours is an interactive pursuit: People don’t just stand in front of what I do as they would if I painted landscapes on canvas. Instead, they actually walk into the spaces I’ve created and experience them with all of their senses.

My clients appreciate what I can do and come to me because they want landscapes or gardens tailored to their desires, lifestyles and quirks. Most know that just about anyone can invade their properties, slam down some pavers, jam in a few plants, collect a check and call it a day. But that’s not me – never has been and never will be – because I want each and every project to be special.

But therein lies the rub: How can I keep reinventing myself and my outlook on each project? How can I keep creating individualized, idiosyncratic gardens – and do so without losing my shirt? How can I afford to stay in a constant state of exploration and experimentation and keep assuming the risks associated with innovation?

Although I’m not afraid of failure in a specific sense of something not working on a project and needing to redo things on the fly, I am afraid of failure on a grander scale and of putting my business at risk to the point of bankruptcy.

Happily, however, I’ve managed to keep that fear at bay for a long time and have stuck to my resolve to stay creative and do my absolute best for my clients. At the same time, I see the effect this sort of fear has on other businesspeople – see how the fear of failure drives so many watershapers and landscape professionals to the “safe harbor” of cookie-cutter designs.

These well-meaning (yet timid) practitioners use the same products and the same approaches on virtually every project they tackle, regardless of the architecture of the home or even the clients’ wishes. These are the ones who label themselves in Yellow Pages ads as “Certified Installers” of some product line or other and, appropriate or not, use it whenever and wherever they can.

They’ll become affiliated with some paver supplier, for example, and will get pretty good at installing that particular product, increasing efficiency and helping the bottom line. And they’ll benefit from getting volume discounts as well. Indeed, it looks so good on the account ledger that this sort of practice is hard to resist.

But look at the results: Every project with the same pavers, the same few tree species, the same plant selections, the same pool shapes – all of them familiar and shopworn and probably passé, regardless of what the architecture of the home calls for or the clients might really want.

In many cases, businesses are driven to the cookie-cutter approach in pursuit of budget-restricted projects where operational efficiency offers the only room to make a buck. As I see it, however, what this approach represents is the design equivalent of a buzz kill – the end of creativity, the demise of art.

BOTH WAYS

In my years in business, I’ve had my share of great clients who’ve had grand ambitions and the resources to realize them. But along the way I’ve also worked with countless clients who had champagne tastes on beer budgets – and it took me a while to differentiate between those two client classes without getting myself into trouble.

In the old days, I used to ask what the budget was and, with beer-level clients, would get either blank stares or unreasonably low price points. Experience has since taught me to turn the tables and tell them, point blank, that what they’re asking for in our initial meeting will work within a given price range I share with them. This lends a dose of reality to the discussions and puts us in a place where we can honestly figure out priorities and move ahead with realistic designs.

I also made the decision early on that, just because a client has a beer budget, modest means would not preclude me from delivering a garden space or watershape that would satisfy his or her desires. This, in fact, is exactly where the art versus productivity issue jumps to the foreground.

In giving our clients with smallish budgets what they want, we decided that we’d avoid the temptation to break out the cookie cutters but would instead focus on being as productive as possible – our avenue toward keeping our prices down for these projects. Just as some cookie-cutter operations trim prices by being brutally efficient in installing certain products, we focus on efficiency as well – but we do what it takes to avoid having our production orientation drive us into any ruts.

A case in point is the large meadow garden we installed for Rochester General Hospital (shortly after completing the Woodward Healing Garden I described in my March 2010 column). We were asked to design the space in front of a newly built, state-of-the-art emergency department and proposed a wildflower meadow with walking trails, ADA-accessible paths, trees and sitting terraces.

Before the design work began, we were given a figure to work with – and what we were proposing went well over that budget. I didn’t want to cut anything out, so I found a way to lower the labor cost by stepping in myself and running the job on site. We brought in our entire crew of ten and planted nearly 2,000 perennials, 700 shrubs and trees and 20,000 square feet of sod in about a week, including all site preparation, grading, mulching and watering.

This approach allowed us to keep maximum artistic leeway while kicking up our production level and still meeting the highest possible standards. The key to making this work was the role I took on site: I kept things moving along at a brisk pace – acting every bit the tyrant – and did so knowing that this was the only way we could deliver champagne results on this particular beer budget.

I know my staff would rebel if I took to applying this approach on every job, but this was a special case and it turned out to be just what was required to ace the job with respect to both artistry and profit.

MAKING THINGS WORK

Through the years, I’ve found many other ways to give clients unique, creative installations while staying within budgets. Many times, for example, we’ll come up with a design that just floors a client – a space he or she just can’t live without but simply can’t afford – and have had to get creative in bringing the design to fruition.

A perfect example of this is a Tuscan-style garden we devised a few years back. The home was set in a typical subdivision, surrounded on three sides by homes set too close for comfort. The one directly behind our clients’ had a pool frequented by every kid within a three-mile radius, so the primary driver for the project was our clients’ desire to isolate themselves in a walled garden.

With a little creativity, it’s possible to lend deluxe touches to what are otherwise simple, inexpensive projects. From unusual fence-top details or inlaid step markers to small (yet visually significant) fountain features, we have the ability to please clients in unexpected ways that add immeasurably to their satisfaction with a project.

As luck would have it, the home had a distinctive Tuscan look, so we proposed enclosing the yard with six-foot-tall stucco walls that would establish an enclosed outdoor space just outside the home’s big family room. We planned on a terrace with a private, intimate, comfortable seating area and lush plantings – what I call a morning-cup-of-coffee/afternoon-glass-of-wine space.

They loved the concept, but the $50,000 cost of the stucco walls made them blanch: This was far beyond what they’d budgeted, and I watched as their initial excitement deflated to disappointment. But I really wanted to do this project, as it’s not often you encounter a Tuscan villa in Rochester, N.Y., so I asked them to give me a few days to figure things out.

The Tuscan-style walls shown here were built inexpensively using a wood structure set on wood footings (similar to fence installation, but deeper!) that we faced with metal lath and stucco. It’s a great way to build ‘stone walls’ on a budget.

After brainstorming with my carpenter and painter, we came up with a solution: We would build the walls like a fence, then stucco the fence. We set six-by-six-inch posts into the ground to the frost line and, above ground level, sheathed them front and back with half-inch exterior plywood while leaving a two-inch air gap at the bottom of the wall. We then stuccoed this structure before hiding the air gap behind plants. Finally, we capped the wall with two-by-10 cedar boards to complete the look. The final cost was about $15,000 – and the clients were thrilled.

(Ironically, we’ve since designed a Tuscan-style courtyard for other clients, this time using real stucco walls and stone veneers that will cost about $70,000. It just goes to prove that one person’s $1,000 is another’s $100,000!)

We apply this same sort of needs-based logic to many aspects of our work, creating magical waterfeatures from off-the-shelf containers, cored-out boulders, slabs of stone – whatever it takes to give clients one-of-a-kind art pieces for relatively small sums of money.

We’ve used candleholders as light fixtures, wiring them up to serve as simple low-voltage sockets, and we’ll mix materials to create “area rugs” of brick, flagstone and/or bluestone amid fields of pavers – simple ideas that take less time to do than to think up but still manage to imprint a project with a unique, eye-catching (and typically client-pleasing) detail.

So, even though I will always struggle to balance artistry with productivity, I find that the quest always serves to keep my creative juices flowing and enables me to design without specifically concerning myself with a client’s budget or demographics. As I see it, I do what I do as an outlet for my creativity – and projects with small budgets truly put my skills and determination to the test.

Bruce Zaretsky is president of Zaretsky and Associates, a landscape design/construction/consultation company in Rochester, N.Y. Nationally recognized for creative and inspiring residential landscapes, he also works with healthcare facilities, nursing homes and local municipalities in conceiving and installing healing and meditation gardens. You can reach him at [email protected].