Pins Mechanical at dusk — cedar planter walls against blue-black brick
Saint Elmo, South Austin  ·  2025  ·  Design & Build

Pins Mechanical

Our drawing, our crews. A warehouse yard turned into a room — by a cedar wall, a gravel floor, and a hundred plants that want the heat.
Location
Saint Elmo
South Austin, Texas
Delivered
2025
Role
Landscape design
& construction
Scope
Cedar planter walls,
planting, gravel courts,
irrigation, interior specimens
01 — The Brief

The building is black brick and steel, the surroundings are asphalt and new-build stucco, and the programme is a bar full of pinball. Nothing here wanted a lawn.

We designed and built the landscape as a single move: a long cedar planter wall that draws the patio edge, holds enough soil to grow real specimens, and doubles as the bench everyone leans on. Inside it, a dry palette — agave, prickly pear, red yucca, muhly, horsetail — set in decomposed granite so the ground reads as desert floor rather than mulched bed. Everything is chosen to look better in August than in April.

The cedar planter wall running the length of the patio, oak and steel canopy beyond
Fig. 01 — The wall sets the edge; the oak sets the shade.
02
The wall

One element doing four jobs.

Property line, seat back, soil volume, and the only warm material on the site. Rough-sawn cedar, laid flat and stacked, left to grey on its own schedule.

The planter wall in full sun, agave and grasses above the cedar, hanging chairs beyond
Fig. 02 — Planting sits above eye level from the sidewalk, below it from the patio.
Frontal view of the planter row beneath the rooftop Pins Mechanical sign
Fig. 03 — Frontal: the sign gets the sky, the planting gets the street.
03 — The Palette

A dry-garden palette, specified for reflected heat off black brick and a patio that never closes.

  • Agave americana
  • Prickly pear
  • Red yucca — Hesperaloe parviflora
  • Horsetail reed
  • Gulf muhly
  • Silver ponyfoot
  • Rosemary
  • Live oak (existing, retained)
Palette to be confirmed against the plant schedule.
Agave, horsetail and red yucca in front of the corten Pins Mechanical panel
Fig. 04 — Specimen agave against the corten panel. Nothing between them.
Red yucca blades in the foreground, the corten Pins Mechanical panel behind
Fig. 05 — Read from the bench: foliage first, brand second.
04
Inside

The same palette, one stop cooler.

Interior lounge corner with potted palms, snake plants and cactus against whitewashed brick
Fig. 06 — Interior corner: palm, sansevieria, cactus, all in matched vessels.
05 — The District

Pins sits inside Saint Elmo — a salvaged industrial court where the ground plane is the architecture, and the trusses were left exactly as found.

The Saint Elmo courtyard — salvaged steel trusses over a decomposed granite court
Fig. 07 — Saint Elmo court: granite floor, salvaged truss, one fire bowl.

Beauty born
from Chaos.

Designed and built in-house — the drawing and the shovel in the same shop.

Landscape Design
Savage Land Solutions
Landscape Contractor
Savage Land Solutions
All plates The Modern Start a project →