About the studio
Designers who also pour the concrete.
On Point Landscape started in 2012 with one truck, one designer and a stubborn idea: the person who draws the garden should be the one standing in it when it gets built.
The story
Mara spent six years drawing gardens that other people built. About half of them came out wrong in the same way.
The grade was off by a few inches, so the patio pooled. The plant list got swapped at the nursery for whatever was in stock. The lighting went in before anyone stood in the garden at night. None of it was anyone's fault. It was the handoff.
So in 2012 she hired Luis, who had run crews for a decade, bought a used dump truck and started building the gardens she drew. The first year was four projects. This year it is about twenty. The shop on Los Gatos Boulevard has fourteen people in it, every one of them on payroll, and we still turn down work we cannot build ourselves.
Design-build, in plain words
You sign one contract with us. We design the garden, price it, pull the permits, build it and plant it. There is no separate contractor to bid, no architect blaming the builder, no builder blaming the drawings.
- One contract
- Design, build, planting
- One number
- Set at the concept phase
- One foreman
- Same person, every day
- One call
- For the first year after
What it costs you is choice. If you want three bids, we are the wrong fit. If you want the plan you approved to be the garden you get, with the price you were quoted, that is what the model is for.
The crew
Fourteen people, no subcontracted strangers.
Two designers, a horticulturist, a project manager, two foremen and eight builders. Our masons set the stone. Our irrigation tech runs the drip. The electrician who wires the lighting has been with us since 2016.
The only trades we bring in are the pool shell, which is a license we do not hold, and the gas line to a kitchen or fire feature, which the town wants from a plumber. Everyone else wears our shirt and drives our truck.
Water
We plan for the dry years, not the wet ones.
Every garden we have built since 2015 runs on drip, on a controller that reads the weather, with plants that want this climate. Averaged across the lawns we have replaced, the water use dropped 38 percent.
- Swales and rain gardens so winter rain soaks in instead of running to the street
- Hydrozoning: thirsty plants together, near the house, and dry plants everywhere else
- Three inches of mulch, replaced every winter, on every bed
- Rebate paperwork filed for you through Valley Water's lawn replacement program
Next step
Start with a walk.
Forty minutes in your yard with Mara or Luis. No drawings yet, no pitch. You get a rough range and an honest read on whether we are the right studio for it.