Landscaping & Hardscaping in Kirkland, WA

Kirkland is one of the few Eastside cities where the street grid tells you the lot size before you get there. Peter Kirk platted the town in 1888 around a steel mill that never really ran, and the surveyor laid out a tight grid of narrow lots with alleys behind them. Norkirk and Market still carry that geometry. A lot of the older houses sit on one or two combined 50-foot lots, which means the useful back yard is often twenty-five feet deep and the alley is the only sane way to bring in material. That alley is an advantage here, not a liability. It is frequently the difference between a machine dig and three days of wheelbarrow work.

The rest of the city arrived in pieces, and the pieces still behave differently. Houghton was its own town until it merged in 1968, and its lake-facing slope holds a lot of 1950s and 60s houses now being rebuilt for the view. Juanita, Finn Hill and Kingsgate spent decades as unincorporated King County and only came into the city in 2011, so those neighborhoods carry county-era infrastructure: roadside ditches instead of curb-and-gutter, downspouts discharging onto turf, and drainage that was never tightlined anywhere. Rose Hill sits up on the plateau and is a mix of 1960s ramblers and a steady stream of infill.

What people ask for divides along the same seam. In Norkirk and Market it is small-yard maximization: a paver terrace that uses the entire rear setback, a cedar fence tall enough to deal with the new house next door, a narrow side path from the alley to the front door that stays walkable in February. Up on Rose Hill and Finn Hill the lots are bigger and the request is usually drainage, a lawn that survives the fir shade, and a wall that turns a sloping back third into flat usable ground. In Houghton and on the Market slope it is terracing for a view, with steps that make a hillside into a place people will actually walk down to.

The digging tells its own story. The plateaus are Alderwood till with a hardpan a shovel bounces off, so perched winter water moves sideways and finds the low corner. The lake-facing slope has the classic Puget Sound stack of permeable sand sitting on dense till, which is why seeps show up partway down a bank and why the city maps landslide hazard along much of that face. The Forbes Creek and Totem Lake basin holds peat and soft organic ground where a patio base needs over-excavation rather than optimism. And on any lot that got rebuilt in the last fifteen years, the first eighteen inches is imported fill compacted by a track hoe, mixed with construction debris, which is a different material entirely from what the neighbor two doors down has.

Kirkland regulates trees seriously, with removal permits and minimum retention standards, so we work out where a wall footing or base section falls relative to a protected root zone before anything is drawn as final. Irrigation is worth a mention as well, because Finn Hill and Kingsgate are served by Northshore Utility District rather than City of Kirkland water, and meter and cross-connection requirements differ between them. Every system we install gets a backflow assembly and a test regardless. For planting we stay with material that takes deep shade and wet winters: sword fern, salal and evergreen huckleberry under retained firs, hydrangea and Japanese maple where there is filtered light, lavender and hebe on a sunny Market slope, carex and red twig dogwood along a Juanita seep line. Design is drawn in-house and the hardscape is built by our own crew, so the person who worked out the grade is standing there when the base goes in.