Home Moves Outside

PROJECT DETAILS Build Time: 6 months | Size: Just under an acre

A Wood Valley Back Yard Becomes an Oasis for Outdoor Living

Holly Brooks, who worked on the King Landscaping of Atlanta’s Wood Valley Backyard, says, “It's a beautiful project.” The yard features all the desirable elements a family could want, fulfilling the client’s brief to get them a more enjoyable and livable space for themselves and their four kids. They wanted a way to not only engage their family, but also to host church activities and youth group gatherings and to host large groups of people in style and comfort.

When King Landscaping came to the project, what they found was a pool that was dated, and there was no real pool deck area to speak of. Instead, there were little areas of concrete where you could put a table or a couple of chairs. The yard was overgrown with a lot of trees that subsequently left debris in the pool. The property is just under an acre, and King Landscaping did work in the front and the back in an attempt to create a cohesive landscape across the whole property . 

What the family has now is a fully functioning extension of the living space. They have an outdoor kitchen that features a grilling station with a gas grill and smoker, a refrigerator and cabinetry. As Holly explains, “It's a big enough space that we could fit out there a living room and a dining room. When you think about outdoor spaces, you think of them as rooms, and so it's an outdoor living room and an outdoor dining room with a little kitchenette, and then the pool space that we renovated. We redid the decking and the coping and there was a wall behind the pool that was a dated stone, so we matched limestone throughout the interior of the covered structure. It's a beautiful limestone and then the pool decking itself is bluestone that extends throughout the pool area, and you exit the backside of the pool into a large fire pit. At the fire pit, there are built-in benches that have wood storage underneath them. Then there's a large lawn space.”

The time spent building this project was in the area six months, during which there was a tremendous amount of rain. King Landscaping started it in the winter, and it was very slow going with the masonry work since that can't be done when it is wet out. Holly says, “The weather slowed us down a good bit, but you know a project of that scale to take six months is not out of the question.”  

For any landscape in Atlanta, drainage is the No. 1 issue. There are neighboring properties that drain onto this property, and so one challenge was to get water to exit their property successfully. In an older part of town like this one, the street elevation was higher than the house and garage, and so water ran onto the property that way as well. Getting the yard to drain properly was important in order to have part of the yard remain a nice, level play space for the kids. 

When the project began, there was a huge hedge of six-foot-tall azaleas behind the pool and part of the yard was visually cut off by these. King Landscaping pulled out the hedge and graded in a retaining wall of dry laid boulders. At the end of the wall, there are big stone steps that go to the lawn area, with a grand stair-like descent that also facilitates drainage. Holly explains that they were then able to grade that lower area more successfully to help it drain and then ran a dry creek bed from the rear of the property all the way out toward a drainage culvert. 

Another way to help with drainage is through plant selection. Holly says, “Largely what we tried to do was be very minimalist with the planting so we used things more so to provide privacy and visual interest with blooms. We used water-loving plants where we needed to. When you permit anything in the city of Atlanta and ask to add hard surfaces, you have to impound the water that you're displacing. We built basically a rain garden up along that dry creek bed. It was a neat opportunity to use a lot of water-loving and native water plants.” 

And so this project is a case of form and function meeting—creating something usable and beautiful from the space they were given.

Get in Touch With...

Holly Brooks
Owner/Partner of King Landscaping
kinglandscapingatl.com