Landscape Design-Build Services in the Pacific Northwest

Residential Landscape Design & Construction Across the Portland, Salem, and Vancouver Metro Areas

A landscape plan is really a set of decisions about elevation, sightlines, and what a property’s soil will support. A patio set 18 inches above a lawn, for example, reads as a room; the same patio at grade reads as an extension of the yard. Those judgments are made on paper, and they carry over into the finished space when the person drawing them knows how the crew will build them.

DeSantis Landscapes has designed and built residential landscapes across Oregon since 1974, keeping both halves of that work under one roof. Your designer stays on as project manager through construction, so the intent behind every grade change and material choice carries straight into the build. We are fully insured, and every residential project we complete carries a warranty on our work.

One plan and one person accountable for the outcome is what separates a finished landscape from a managed compromise. Call (503) 782-7356 or contact us online to schedule landscape design-build services in the Pacific Northwest today.

What the Design-Build Model Changes

Pricing enters the conversation during concept development, while the plan is still flexible. Bluestone and a quality concrete paver read very differently on a budget, and knowing that early means you choose between them rather than discovering the gap after the drawings are finished. At the final design review, you receive a detailed construction proposal that includes the full scope, already priced.

The structure produces a few concrete advantages, including:

• A single point of contact. Your designer answers questions about both the plan and the build, so nothing gets routed between companies.
• Compressed timelines. Our team schedules its own crews, which closes the gaps that tend to pop up when separate firms coordinate with one another.
• Continuous accountability. The same manager carries the project from the first site visit through to the final walkthrough.

You stay as involved as you want to be. What changes is that your input reaches the crew directly, without a second company interpreting it along the way.

Designing for the Willamette Valley Ground

Every design begins with a site visit, because the property itself supplies the best information. Willamette Valley ground shifts from heavy-clay lowlands to well-drained loam, sometimes within a single lot, and each supports a different palette. Clay holds water long enough to make a rain garden thrive where a lavender border would struggle, so testing what sits below grade early lets us put the right plant in the right soil from the start.

Slope and sun exposure shape the rest of the plan. On the terraced lots around Fairmount Hill and Candalaria, a retaining wall can become the organizing feature of a design, creating usable level ground and a seating edge. We build plant lists around native and adapted species that settle into these conditions, hold their form with modest upkeep, and feed the pollinators already working their way through Pacific Northwest gardens.

Hardscapes & Features Built for Pacific Northwest Properties

Hardscape determines how a landscape is used. A path sets the route people take across a yard, a wall levels a slope, and a patio establishes where everyone gathers. Those elements come out of the same drawings as the planting plan, so the built and the growing parts of a property fit each other rather than compete. 

Our crews can construct:

• Patios, decks, and walkways.
• Retaining and seating walls.
• Pergolas and outdoor kitchens.
• Firepits and dining areas.
• Rain gardens and bioswales.
• Irrigation systems and accent lighting.
• Drainage and runoff abatement.

Materials do quiet work once they are in the ground. Permeable paving is the clearest example: rainfall passes through the surface and into the soil below, so a driveway on a sloped lot recharges the ground it sits on rather than sending runoff toward the street, which is also how it meets Marion County's surface water standards. What the paving handles at the surface, smart irrigation controllers handle at the root, reading local weather data and releasing only what the plants have actually used. Soil restoration extends that logic downward, rebuilding the structure that allows water to move and roots to spread. Water stewardship shapes the plan from the first sketch forward.

A landscape built by the same team that designed it still matches the drawings when the crew drives away. Reach us at (503) 782-7356 or contact us online for landscape design-build services in the Pacific Northwest.