Landscaping & Hardscaping in Magnolia, Seattle

Magnolia sits on a bluff. That bluff explains almost everything about how we build here. Fort Lawton, now Discovery Park, is the type locality for the Lawton Clay, the dense glaciolacustrine unit under this part of Seattle. Above it is Esperance sand, which water moves through easily. Above that, up on the crown, Vashon till. Rain sinks through the sand, hits the clay and can't keep going down. So it turns sideways and comes out of the slope face as a seep. That's what drives the slides Perkins Lane has taken more than once, including the well-documented losses in the mid-1990s. It's also why Seattle maps long stretches of the western and southern slope as landslide-prone. Anything we build near that line gets engineered. We don't eyeball it.

The houses here are older and bigger than most of Seattle. Southeast Magnolia and the blocks around Magnolia Village went up in the 1920s and 30s. Brick Tudors, Colonials, clinker-brick bungalows, real front yards. Lawton Park, Briarcliff and Carleton Park filled in after the war with ramblers and daylight basements pointed at the water view. Those lots often run seven to ten thousand square feet, which is generous for Seattle. The gardens came with the houses. Sixty-year-old rhododendrons that are small trees by now. Laurel hedges doing the job of a wall. Douglas fir and bigleaf maple with root plates running under exactly the ground you want to pave. On a lot of first visits here we spend more time finding roots than measuring squares.

Three bridges get you into Magnolia. That's all there is. The Magnolia Bridge from the south, Dravus in the middle, Emerson at the north end. The Magnolia Bridge is old, took damage in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, and has been in city replacement planning ever since. We route heavy deliveries with that in mind. We never assume all three approaches are open the day base rock shows up. Once you're up on the hill the streets narrow and start following the contours. Driveways on the bluff side are short, steep, sometimes shared. Alleys are rare outside the older southeast blocks. Plenty of material ends up moving by buggy or conveyor from a staging spot on the street. We'll say so in the estimate.

View drives nearly every Magnolia design we draw. People want to sit outside and still see the Sound and the Olympics. That keeps the whole vocabulary low. Seating walls do the work a fence would do. We step a terrace down into the slope instead of building it up out of it. Plants get picked for what they'll be in ten years, so dwarf conifers and low evergreen structure, nothing that hits six feet in five years and becomes a removal problem. Wind is the part homeowners forget. A bluff-top garden on the west side takes salt-loaded southwesterlies straight off Puget Sound. 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 go on the sheltered east side of the house, where they're actually happy.

Digging in Magnolia is two different jobs. Depends where the lot sits. On the crown, near the Village and across the flatter interior, it's 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. We don't pretend we can hold a vertical face. Drainage goes in behind a wall before the next course goes on top of it. Springs show up mid-slope in spots that were dry all summer. Near Discovery Park we hit Fort Lawton era infrastructure, buried concrete and abandoned utility runs that appear on no current drawing. We call 811, then still open the first two feet by hand.