Landscaping & Hardscaping in Des Moines, WA

Des Moines is old by South King County standards. It was platted in 1889 and incorporated in 1959, and the lot pattern still reflects that. Narrow 25-foot and 50-foot original platted lots, some of them combined over the years and some not, streets that simply dead-end at the top of the bluff, and a housing mix that runs from 1920s and 1930s waterfront cottages along Marine View Drive up through 1950s and 1960s ramblers on the upland, then a layer of 1990s townhomes and 2000s infill around Pacific Ridge and the Marina District. Nothing here is a uniform plat, which is exactly why a Des Moines bid has to be built from a site visit rather than a square-foot table.

The bluff governs everything west of Marine View Drive. The stratigraphy is the classic Vashon sequence: a cap of dense glacial till over advance outwash sand, sitting on Lawton Clay. Rainwater moves down through the sand, hits clay it cannot pass, and comes out sideways at that contact. The elevation where the groundwater daylights is the elevation where the bluff face slides, and you can read the history in the leaning alders below Woodmont and Redondo. In practical terms, a wall, a cut, or any new concentrated surface water on the west side of a Des Moines lot is a geotechnical question before it is a hardscape question. We say that at the walkthrough instead of pricing it like a normal wall and finding out later.

Views drive the design brief here, and it is the opposite of what we get asked for in Federal Way or Auburn. Half the reason people bought is the water, Maury Island and the Olympics behind it, so the instruction is almost always to keep everything low. Seat walls at 18 inches rather than privacy screens. Planting that tops out below the sightline from the deck. Evergreen structure that still reads well in February, because a Des Moines yard gets looked at from indoors for four months of the year. Salt narrows the plant list on top of that. At Woodmont, Redondo and Salt Air the southwest wind carries spray, and kinnikinnick, salal, evergreen huckleberry, hebe, lavender and carex hold up on an exposed bluff-top lot where a hydrangea that would be perfectly happy in North Hill gets burned brown on a windward corner.

East of Marine View Drive the city flattens out. North Hill and Zenith sit on the same Alderwood till plain as Kent West Hill, and the work there is more familiar: patios built over compacted till, sprinkler zones trenched through shallow sandy loam, short cedar fence runs between close neighbors. Access becomes the real constraint rather than geology. The older streets are narrow, on-street parking is contested, and many of these houses have a single-car driveway on a grade. We plan material staging, excavator delivery and haul-off around the street on day one instead of assuming a dump trailer can live at the curb for a week, and on the tightest lots we phase deliveries so the neighbors keep their parking.

Two practical notes. Water service across most of Des Moines comes from Highline Water District, so an irrigation meter and its backflow assembly are permitted and annually tested through the district rather than through City Hall. And the shop is close. Fifteen minutes west on Kent-Des Moines Road puts our crew, the mini excavator and the next pallet of block on site without a travel day attached, which matters more than it sounds like when a bluff-side job needs a short weather window. Blue Landscaping Services has been licensed and bonded in Washington under BLUELLS880K2 since 2012, and the hardscape install is done by our own people, not handed to a sub.