How Should I Pick the Right Hardscape Designer for My Savannah Backyard?

Most people I sit down with have gotten three quotes and they’re not really sure how to tell them all apart. All three of them say design on them. But for two of them, design only means a photo of somebody else’s backyard and then they give a per square foot price. So you end up having to base your decision on the only thing that has a number or details, which is price. Unfortunately that’s how people end up with a patio that looks nothing like the one they pictured in their head.

My name is Randy Thompson. I left an aerospace career to start All Out Hardscapes & Lighting Solutions, and over the past 10 years we have built more than 150 patios, walkways, and outdoor living spaces across Savannah and the Lowcountry, including work on Wilmington Island and in Savannah Quarters, Pooler, and Richmond Hill. I am a certified Techo-Pro installer, which is a manufacturer certification through Techo-Bloc. Hardscaping is just the built part of a yard: patios, walkways, walls, driveways, and the lighting that goes with them.

Here’s my professional take on this after building over 150 patios. A design is much more than just a picture. It’s a series of ideas and decisions about your specific lot, your gate, your downspouts, and where the water flows during a hard rain. Every one of those things should be visible to you on paper before any work is ever done. So don’t interview a designer, make them show you.

How Do I Tell a Real Designer From a Salesperson With a Photo?

That’s an easy one, you make them draw your yard before you give them any money. That one thing will quickly weed out most of the ones that are not true designers.

A bunch of pictures of finished projects only tells you a crew knows how to build. It doesn’t mean that anyone has planned something out for your property individually. Your lot is different with a different grade and different water paths. You don’t want them to show you what they built for someone else in a different neighborhood. You want them to show you what they can do with your yard before you commit to anything.

Three things a designer should be able to put in front of you before you sign a contract or pay anything:

• A to-scale drawing of your actual lot, drawn from the official survey and building documents the county keeps on file for your property.
• The drainage marked on that drawing, in a color that’s easy to see.
• The exact paver you would be getting, held up in person against the actual color of your house.

A company that can produce all three of those things is truly designing. A company that can’t provide you with those things is quoting a patio and calling it a design.

Did They Draw My Actual Property, or Somebody Else’s Backyard?

We pull your building documents and survey from the county and lay your house out first. The design gets built on top of that. Then that same drawing becomes the blueprint for the actual job, which is the plan our crew uses to build from on site. One document actually does two things. It shows you the space, and it tells the guys where everything goes.

Claire does all the renderings. She sets your walkway or patio into a drawing with a grass background. This way you’re looking at your own yard instead of a slab set on a white background, and we go back and forth making changes and adjustments until you tell us you’re happy with it. We have been doing that at no charge on 95 percent of our jobs, including the small ones.

A couple of companies around here will produce a drawing for you. But not very many of them turn that drawing into the official blueprint the crew actually builds from. That’s the reason a lot of projects end up not looking how you pictured them in the end. A drawing built on your real property and specifics will show you what a plain photo can’t. Things like how far the patio sits off the house, where the downspout dumps, and how much usable yard is left once the pavers are in.

Can They Show Me Where the Water Goes Before Anyone Digs?

Ask them to show you the drainage on the drawing, not just talk about it. If they have to tell you where it would go instead of being able to point to it with their finger, it has not been planned. They are just guessing.

On our drawings, drainage is always drawn in red. It used to be tan, which looked nicer on the page, but it almost mixed into the grass and the pavers around it, so nobody ever asked about it because they couldn’t see it. That’s why we switched it to red. Now people will point out the line and ask what it does, and that’s exactly the conversation we want to have in the driveway with a drawing in hand, not in the yard after it’s rained and there’s a problem.

You don’t have to understand the whole system to do this test. All you gotta do is see the line and ask them where the water goes when there’s a hard rain. Somebody who has actually looked at and studied your property will tell you the direction and destination of the flowing water.

How Do I Know What the Pavers Will Look Like Against My House?

We hand people a Techo-Bloc book literally as we’re walking up the driveway. It shows every paver and every color we install, because we only use the Techo-Bloc brand. Before we get there, we go through the pictures you sent us and mark certain pages we want to show you. We walk up with the pages of the pavers closest to what you showed us already marked.

There’s a QR code in the book. You scan it the same way you would any other QR code and then you select the option to “view in my space”. Then pick your color and hold the picture it gives you up against your own house so you can see what they look like together. That book is our menu. It is also how we save you from falling in love with a color on a screen that doesn’t work with your brick house in real life.

There is a small caveat we will be clear about. Because we install only one brand of pavers, that menu has its limits. But the major benefit is that you get a crew that sets that exact same product every week and knows everything about it.

Who Makes the Final Call on the Design, Me or Them?

You should always make the final call. We bring you in when the drawing is at about 85 percent, not when it’s all the way finished. The last set of decisions are all for you. You decide if you want to move the fire pit, make the walkway wider, or change the border color. We are able to do that remotely. We send you the drawing and then we get on the phone and make the final changes together before it’s turned into the official blueprint.

This is a good question to ask any builder on your list: “At what point in the process do I get to see the design? And do I get to make changes at that point?” When you’re given a design that’s already finished without asking for your input, that’s simply more convenient for the crew. Remember, you are the one who has to live with this backyard, so make sure it’s what you want.

What Should I Expect to Hear After I Hand Over a Deposit?

Design is half the decision. The other half is the part that comes between signing a contract and starting to build. It’s that moment in time when your money is gone and nothing has happened in your yard yet. That’s definitely the number one thing that people worry about.

The minute you give us a downpayment, you get a date on the calendar when the work will start. Based on our current schedule, it’s usually about a month out. From there we call you at least once a week, even if there’s nothing to report. We just want to make sure you know we are still here.

And we tell people everything, including the stuff that might make us look bad. If we blow a breaker in your house, we have a generator on the truck, so it’s not a big deal. Maybe we noticed that another contractor drilled a hole in your wall, and you should know it wasn’t us. If we see that it’s going to rain on Thursday, we may push off the work for a day. We over-speak sometimes, but that’s how we’d rather be.

We have our reasons for that. If we handed someone eight thousand dollars of our hard-earned money and then they went quiet for three weeks, we would be afraid they just took the money and ran. Nobody should have to feel that way for a month. So when you’re interviewing builders, ask them how often you’ll hear from them after you put down your deposit and find out who will be calling you.

The Small Decisions That Tell You Someone Actually Designed It

Every part of every job has a purpose. On one build, the walkway is offset about a foot to the right of the middle. On the drawing it looks like it’s just measured wrong and that it’s way off. But the gate hinges are on that side, so when the gate swings open it clears the pavers and you don’t have to walk in the grass to get around it.

Decisions like that need to be made in the design phase on paper. Once the stone base is compacted and the edge restraint is set, you can’t just slide a walkway a foot to the right. You will have to take it all apart and rebuild it. The best time to solve that problem is while it is still a line on a drawing and it’s not expensive to change.

On that same job the homeowner had a small dog, so we custom-ordered the drainage grates with very small openings so that the dog’s feet don’t go through the grate. When we were done, it looked exactly like the drawing we did. That’s what you judge a design off of.

If you have a gate that swings the wrong way, a dog, a low corner that holds water after a storm, or a downspout dumping waterfalls right where you want to put a table, you need to make sure those things are accounted for on the drawing or you get expensive surprises and retrofitting projects. That is what we mean when we say it is not hardscape, it is artscape.

When You Are Better Off Skipping the Design Process

Not every job needs all the things we talked about. If you really just want a square off the back door with just one type of paver and color, on flat ground with no water problems, then a rendering is just unnecessary. A capable crew can build that with not much more than a tape measure, and you should be more focused on what goes under the pavers and what it costs, not on drawings and renderings.

If you want a designer who will put every paver line on the market in front of you, we don’t do that. We only install one manufacturer, one brand. Somebody who works with more than one brand can show you more options than we can. So if that matters more for you than a crew that sets the same product all the time, then that’s a legitimate reason to hire them instead.

And if you’re only basing your decision on the lowest number per square foot, no drawing is going to change your mind, so it doesn’t make sense to pay someone to make one.