We’ll bring your ideas to life.

Got some ideas about your landscaping but not sure how to pull it all together? We’re here to help. With over 19 years’ experience designing residential gardens, outdoor living areas, country properties, heritage estates, hobby farms, and sustainable permaculture gardens, our team will design an outdoor oasis that reflects your personal taste and complements your lifestyle.

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The landscape design process

Beautiful exteriors that work.

Your outdoor living spaces work hard: they need to match the design of your home, cater to your lifestyle, and reflect your personal style.

We will sit down with you to deeply understand your needs, so that we can design landscapes that are both beautiful and functional for many years to come.

Residential landscape design process

This is our process for residential projects for sites from 100m2 to 1,000m2. For larger country properties and rural estates, get in touch to discuss a plan to suit your needs.

Initial consultation

Whether you’re building a new home, renovating an existing garden, wanting an exterior style makeover for your older home, restoring a historic home, putting in a swimming pool, or building an alfresco area, we’ll always start with an initial consultation.

Courtyard Plantings Ideas

Planting Colour Ideas

Vegetable Garden Style – Raised Brick

Fence Style Idea

Getting ready for your design consultation

  • Complete our landscape design questionnaire: this helps us make the best use of our consultation time.
  • Create a Pinterest board: pin a selection of images you love in preparation for our meeting. Visit Lisa Harper Designs on Pinterest to get started – we’ve separated all aspects of outdoor living for easy pinning. Have fun with this as a family.
  • Make lists of the ‘nice to haves’ and the ‘must haves’. Try to limit your final image board to your most loved 20 images to make decision making easier.
  • Share your site and building plans.
  • Send us your site photos if we are working remotely.

Your initial design consultation

We’ll meet for 90 minutes, and this is where we really get to know your family’s needs and garden requirements.

This can be done in person (if you’re in the Melbourne Metro area) or online (if you’re further afield). Be prepared to answer lots more questions about your ideas, dreams and lifestyle.

We’ll dig deep to understand how you want to spend time outside – whether you’re a family of entertainers, veggie gardeners, or sustainability champions, we’ll work out what you need in each of your outdoor spaces.

We’ll help you to prioritise your overflowing wish list and we’ll work out what’s possible on your site within your budget. We’ll take some photos and review your architectural house plans (if you have them), your Google Earth site plan, site considerations and limitations, and the overall scope of work.

With our gentle guidance, you’ll imagine your finished garden. Together, we’ll build your landscape design mood board – the vision that encapsulates the style for all of the elements in your exterior living spaces.

After the meeting

We’ll go away and refine the vision and scope, and send it to you along with a Landscape Design Fee Proposal.

The fee proposal tells you how much your landscape design will cost. It confirms the scope of work and explains how the rest of the design process works. Once you approve the fee, we move on to designing your concept plans.

Initial consultation fee

The initial landsdcape design consultation costs $550 – $650 Melbourne Metropolitan Areas plus GST and includes:

  • A 90 minute consultation
  • A completed landscape design vision board

Advice on

  • Material suggestions, finish ideas, colour palette, garden ornamentation ideas and overall style makeover advice.
  • Outdoor entertaining area design, pergola design, alfresco design, outdoor kitchen design, fire pit design, and built-in seating design.
  • Pool renovation and design, pool layout based on easements and functional flow, pool material suggestions.
  • Exterior finishes, decks, paved areas, driveway material, and edging style, making sure it suits your property and design direction and creating a cohesive style.
  • Privacy and screening design, including plants, timber slats, lattice or composite screens.
  • Planting styles and general plant selection advice to match your chosen design style. We also advise which existing plants need removal if they encroach on foundations, or may cause structural issues later on.
  • We can suggest arborists to check the health and longevity of any trees you already have onsite which you are not sure about. We can also suggest Council Arborist Appointments if we think a tree needs checking for protection or removal.
  • Possible restrictions and limitations, like easements, building overhangs, building shadows and possible council regulations for your area.

Notes

  • No sketches are provided with this service.
  • Fees are due on the day of the appointment, we have credit card facilities for you for immediate payment or direct bank transfer. 

Concept plan

Landscape Design Melbourne, Planting Plab

We start the concept development with a full site analysis, gathering architectural plans, and any site survey plans. A site survey may be required.

Over a series of four intensive 1.5 hour meetings, our team will develop concept designs, while considering specific details such as flow of traffic, movement of the sun, different zone usages, lighting, irrigation, and structures like alfresco areas, pools, retaining walls and water features.

Your artistic, hand-drawn, full coloured 2D concept plan will be refined over the four meetings until it reflects your vision, personality, and lifestyle.

The concept plan includes

Material plan notes

Specifies what materials will be used for the elements of your hard landscaping plan. Think bricks, stone, pavers, timber, and all the solid and unchanging aspects of your garden.

Hard landscaping plan

Details and drawings for items like your driveway, entry way, privacy screening, pedestrian paths, paved areas, retaining walls, alfresco areas, pergolas, fences, pool, spa, outdoor shower, dog wash area, tennis court, utility areas, fire pit, garden beds, garden rooms, and schematic lighting ideas.

Soil improvement instructions

Plants thrive in healthy, vibrant soils and we’ll give you instructions on how to balance your minerals, add nutrition through composting, fertilising, and mulching to build soil health.

Soft landscaping plan

Covers the living, horticultural parts of your garden like plants, flowers, trees, and shrubs. We’ll select the lawn type and all your plant species including the numbers of plants required, and the genus and species. Most importantly we will make sure the right sized plant or tree is chosen for each particular area of your garden.

Planting plan

We specialise in low-maintenance, drought-tolerant planting plans, however, if you require seasonal planting schemes, mixed flower borders, or ornamental flower beds, we can design these too. Our planting plans show the layout and location of all plant selections.

Exterior styling plan and proposal

(If requested at an additional cost) A furniture layout drawn to scale with all the various style components, like furniture, pots, plants, rugs, lamps, lights, and outdoor rugs. We’ll share supplier details and include a fee proposal if you’d like us to purchase, deliver, and install your outdoor furnishings.

Recommendations

We suggest trusted landscape installers and material suppliers for our Melbourne customers.

Get a quote

Our last meeting

In our last meeting, we’ll present the final concept plan. With the plan finalised, you can choose to bring it to life with 2D and 3D CAD visualisations with conceptual elevations, including video fly throughs.

Then things get really exciting – it’s time to start construction.

Notes

We provide concept plans suitable for landscape construction purposes only, not engineering drawings or building plans which will be required for some garden elements like alfresco areas, pools and structural retaining walls. We have trusted engineers and registered builders who we can recommend to do these plans for you.

2D CAD Landscape plan

Beyond design

Landscape design

With the design finalised, you’ll be bursting to start construction. We can recommend builders and landscapers (if you’re in the Melbourne area) to help you bring the designs to life, or you can find your own or DIY.

We can also help you oversee construction, attending meetings with your subcontractors to ensure the results are true to our vision.

We can teach you how to control your budget and share insider tips on how to save money during the construction process, and we’ll continue to share insights and recommendations for buying your plants, improving your soil, and improving sustainability in your garden.

Got some questions?

Book a free, no obligation discovery call and we’ll get you sorted.

Book a consultation 0493 559 523