A couple weeks ago the team at Postgreen decided to officially hire local landscape architecture and urban design firm Studio Bryan Hanes to develop back yard landscaping options for our future Postgreen Homes clients.
Bryan came highly recommended from Brian Phillips of ISA and we couldn’t be happier that we took his advice. The illustrations you see below are some of the initial concepts that Bryan’s studio has come up with in the past few weeks. These are the options we are leaning towards for the new Postgreen Homes site launching at our July 30th party. Let’s get into these bad boys. All titles are courtesy of Nic, the Creative Content Master.
Entertainment
Built-in bench and table for entertaining. Ample open gravel space for many guests during your fancy parties.
What’s up with the suit here?
The Easiest Maze
Visual interest. Ample planting beds with easy access ideal for food or flowers. Intimate enough to relax. Flexible enough to entertain. Fun for kids.
Urban Farming
This has been our largest request to date. People want as large an area as possible to plant food things. This layout solves that with a modern layout that is easy to reach all plants. It also provides a nice sitting and entertaining area for your guests that may not want to help you garden.
Welcome to the Jungle
For those not interested in food plantings as much as simply being surrounded by as much greenery as possible. Ideal for singles and couples and small dinner parties.
Play Time
For those of us with children that require space to run and play. Also great for grown up yard games of skill. Think bocce or cornhole, not lawn darts.
Options
We plan to offer a bunch of customization options or upgrades on each of these layouts as well. For instance, we would have a base material for the decking, but if you wanted to upgrade to something like Ipe, you could do that on the new site. Other options could include gravel types, groundcover, planting packages and plater box materials.
We also talk quite a bit late last night about how to illustrate different size lots. The images above represent a 17′ wide by 17′ deep yard which is pretty common for a Philadelphia rowhome. This will obviously not be the case for every home. Some will be 12′ deep and other might be 25′. In the end we decided it is best to simply keep the layouts as shown to illustrate the concept for the back yard. The actual decking square footage or # of planters and such may change, but the overall concept of the layout will remain intact.
Let us know what you think of the proposed layouts. There is a limited time to make changes to them and this may be your last chance to influence our direction.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
The Urban Farming layout is sub-optimal and the beds should also be raised. Don’t think beds in area, think minimal access paths cut into growing area. Also the relationship between the building geometry, bed locations and sunlight direction is very important.
Thanks for the suggestions Dan. All beds will most likely be raised in the end because the soil is pretty lousy in these parts. Also, due to the modern design of the homes, we like to provide as much visual interest as possible in the yard. This is why you won’t see a traditional large garden area in one of our plans…
I think all of these options are excellent. If I was a Postgreen home purchaser I would have an insanely difficult time deciding which one of these I would want to run with.
Very good variety of options!
Where’s the solar jacuzzi option?