Landscaping & Hardscaping in Magnolia, Seattle

Magnolia is a bluff neighborhood, and the bluff explains almost everything about how work gets built here. Fort Lawton, now Discovery Park, is the type locality for the Lawton Clay, the dense glaciolacustrine unit that underlies this part of Seattle. Above it lies permeable Esperance sand, and above that, on the crown, Vashon till. Rain moves down through the sand, meets the clay, turns sideways and comes out of the slope face as a seep. That is the mechanism behind the slides Perkins Lane has taken more than once, including the well-documented losses in the mid-1990s, and it is why Seattle maps long stretches of the western and southern slope as landslide-prone. Any structure we put near that line gets engineered, not eyeballed.

The building stock is older and larger than most of Seattle. Southeast Magnolia and the blocks around Magnolia Village went up in the 1920s and 30s as brick Tudors, Colonials and clinker-brick bungalows on lots with genuine front yards. Lawton Park, Briarcliff and Carleton Park filled in after the war with ramblers and daylight basements aimed squarely at the water view, and those parcels frequently run seven to ten thousand square feet, which by Seattle standards is generous. Mature gardens come with the territory: sixty-year-old rhododendrons that have become small trees, laurel hedges functioning as walls, and Douglas fir and bigleaf maple whose root plates run under exactly the ground you would like to pave. A meaningful share of our first site visits here are spent locating roots rather than measuring squares.

Three bridges connect Magnolia to the rest of the city, and only three: the Magnolia Bridge from the south, Dravus in the middle, Emerson at the north end. The Magnolia Bridge is old, was damaged in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, and has been in long-running city replacement planning ever since, so we route heavy deliveries with that in mind and never assume all three approaches are open on the day base rock shows up. Once you are up on the hill the streets narrow and start to follow the contours. Driveways on the bluff side are short, steep and sometimes shared. Alleys are rare outside the older southeast blocks. A fair amount of material ends up moving by buggy or conveyor from a staging spot on the street, and the honest version of an estimate says so.

View is the organizing principle of nearly every Magnolia design we draw. People here want to sit outside without giving up the Sound and the Olympics, which pushes the entire vocabulary low. Seating walls instead of fences. A terrace stepped down into the slope rather than built up out of it. Dwarf conifers and low evergreen structure instead of anything that will be six feet tall in five years and a removal problem in ten. Wind is the constraint homeowners forget. A bluff-top garden on the west side takes salt-loaded southwesterlies straight off Puget Sound, and species that thrive two blocks inland scorch out there. Hebe, lavender, kinnikinnick, salal and dwarf conifers hold their own. Hydrangea, Japanese maple and vine maple belong on the sheltered east side of the house, where they are genuinely happy instead of merely surviving.

Digging in Magnolia is two different jobs depending on where the lot sits. On the crown, near the Village and across the flatter interior, it is shallow soil over Vashon till and the usual hardpan behavior: water perches, winter yards stay soft, and the base section has to drain to daylight. Down the slope the sand runs. A cut that stands clean at nine in the morning will slough by early afternoon, so we bench, shore or step the excavation instead of pretending we can hold a vertical face, and drainage goes in behind a wall before the next course goes on top of it. Springs appear mid-slope in places that were dry all summer. Near Discovery Park we run into Fort Lawton era infrastructure, buried concrete and abandoned utility runs that appear on no current drawing, which is a good reason to call 811 and then still open the first two feet by hand. Design is done in our own office and our own crew builds it, which on a Magnolia slope is the difference between a wall that was drawn to be built and a wall that gets improvised at the bottom of the hole.