My client’s home

is on a private golf course and his goal was to completely overhaul the back yard to make it more usable, easier to maintain and if we are being honest…Make the neighbors a little jealous. 

As we were in the planning stages of this project we had a design that our client had approved but there was a hang up. For some time, we could not find a retaining wall product that fit the aesthetic our client wanted. The walls our site required were large and our client did not want his yard to look commercial so many of the traditional straight faced block options were not gonna cut it. The year prior I had used Rosetta Outcropping on a project for a client that had similar taste so I suggested the material for these large walls and it turned out to be a fantastic fit for the property.

This project presented so many site specific challenges that I would be writing ad nauseum if I detailed every issue but lets start with the fact that we are building large structural walls in heavy marine grade clay on a shoreline. In these conditions our methods change a bit, we would be using additional drainage considerations, soil re enforcement and geo textiles as underlayment. 

The property used to be part of the golf course itself but in the 70s, the course sold the land to a developer. As we dug deeper we found that a portion of this yard was built over an old refuse pile of everything from broken bottles to rusty car parts and old bikes. As we removed obstructions and pioneered forward, we found old whiskey bottles and even an old name tag from a PGA tour in the 60s. The inconsistencies in our substrate meant that the ground had to be amended to achieve some consistency and we did so with rock and sand. 

The slope was steep and at the bottom was the lake. I had to improvise a zig zag road to the bottom in order to safely transport materials and perform our ground work.