Landscaping & Hardscaping in Redmond, WA

Redmond is a valley town with hills on both shoulders, and the contrast is sharper than it looks from the road. The Sammamish River valley floor runs through the middle at forty to sixty feet of elevation, flat and soft, old lake and floodplain deposits with peat layers in them, farmed for well over a century before it was anything else. Education Hill rises north of downtown and Union Hill rises east, both of them Vashon till uplands topping out four hundred feet or more above the valley. Bear Creek and Evans Creek come down off the east side and meet the river near downtown. A patio on Education Hill and a patio three quarters of a mile away on the valley floor are not the same build.

The growth history explains the housing stock better than any style guide. Overlake and Grass Lawn are largely 1960s and 70s, built when Redmond was still a small town with a bike race and a couple of taverns. Education Hill filled in steadily from the 1960s through the 1990s. The Bear Creek, Union Hill and North Redmond plats are mostly late 80s through 2000s, arriving with the software boom, which means their landscapes were installed as builder packages between roughly 1995 and 2010. Those packages are now hitting the wall all at once: the four-foot block retaining wall the builder set without geogrid is leaning, the lawn under thirty years of fir growth is more moss than grass, and the irrigation controller in the garage is a model nobody stocks parts for.

There is a jurisdiction trap worth knowing about here. Redmond Ridge and the Novelty Hill area carry Redmond mailing addresses and 98053 ZIP codes while sitting in unincorporated King County. Permits for those parcels go through King County Permitting, under county thresholds and the county drainage manual, not through Redmond City Hall. It is the kind of thing that only matters once, at exactly the wrong moment, so we confirm the parcel before pricing anything that needs a permit.

Underneath, the two halves behave differently under a compactor. On Education Hill and Union Hill it is Alderwood till with cemented hardpan between roughly a foot and three feet down, bearing load well but shedding winter water sideways, which is where the soggy back corner and the leaning 1990s wall both come from. Toward the valley the ground turns to organic silt and peat with a seasonal water table close to the surface, and that material loses strength when it is wet, pumps under a plate compactor and will settle under a patio built as though it were till. Base sections down there get separation fabric, more depth and a genuine outlet. Redmond also runs its own municipal wells, so much of the city sits inside wellhead protection and critical aquifer recharge mapping, which puts real attention on excavation depth and on documenting where imported fill came from. Bear Creek and Evans Creek carry salmon, and their buffers are wide and enforced.

We draw the design in-house and our own crew self-performs the hardscape, which keeps the grading plan and the finished grade in agreement. Planting is chosen for what Redmond actually delivers: deep fir shade on the hills and cold wet feet in the valley. Sword fern, salal and evergreen huckleberry under the retained conifers. Vine maple and rhododendron where a bed needs some height. Red twig dogwood and carex in the low ground that will never be truly dry. Lavender, kinnikinnick and hebe on the open sunny slope of an Education Hill front yard. Irrigation gets zoned to those exposures rather than run on one schedule, with a backflow assembly and a test on every system, and a fall blowout so nothing splits in December.