- Location
- Utopia
Hill Country, Texas - Owner's Representative
- Cumming Group
- Savage Land Scope
- Stone, hardscape, drainage
& planting - Client
Owner's Representative Cumming Group · Landscape Contractor Savage Land Solutions
A canyon floor gives you caliche, flash runoff, and a hundred-degree summer. Everything built on it has to move water, hold grade, and survive its first August.
The campus is organized around a ring of turf with a concrete walk on its rim. From there the walks curve out between the lodges and halls, stepping down where the grade asks for it, with corten rails and bollards marking the way. Limestone walls take up the level changes; dry-creek beds of the same stone carry the runoff between them. Planting is native and young, mulched and staked, chosen to fill in over the first seasons rather than to arrive finished. Savage Land built the scope with Cumming Group as the owner's representative.
The same limestone does two jobs: stacked, it holds the grade; laid loose in a swale, it carries the storm.
Walls are dry-set and low, seat height where people gather and knee height where they only need to hold a bed. Between buildings, dry-creek beds take the roof and paving runoff across the site in the open, so nothing is asked of a pipe that the ground can do on its own.
Sage, prickly pear, and native grasses in mulched beds; new trees staked and ringed along the walks. Sized to establish through the first Hill Country summers, not to photograph on delivery day.
A campus is judged by how it wears. This one was built to look better in year five than on delivery day.