Original Landscape Concepts

Original Landscape Concepts Inc. is a residential landscape design and construction firm in Dallas, Texas. It works almost entirely in the luxury end of the North Texas market, designing and building gardens, pools, and outdoor rooms for large-lot homes in neighborhoods like Preston Hollow, the Park Cities, and the affluent suburbs north and west of the city. Mike Dickerson and Dave Hunchik started the company in 2008. It is one of the leading landscape design firms in the greater Dallas area.

The firm runs on a simple promise it prints on its own materials: "Design, Build, Install." One company draws the plan, builds it, and plants it. Between the two principals there is more than 50 years of work in the trade. The office sits at 7879 Spring Valley Road in far North Dallas, near the Addison line, and the crew that shows up to your house is largely the firm's own.

History

Original Landscape Concepts was founded in 2008. Mike Dickerson and Dave Hunchik had both spent years in the Dallas residential landscape business before they went into partnership, and they built the company around a particular kind of client: someone with a big lot, a demanding house, and the expectation that the yard match the architecture. North Dallas has no shortage of those clients. The firm set up shop there and stayed close to its market.

The early portfolio leaned on Preston Hollow. Anyone who knows Dallas knows what that means. The neighborhood runs along Preston Road and Walnut Hill, full of estates set back behind motor courts and old live oaks, and it has drawn the city's money for generations. Landing work there gave the firm a reputation. From Preston Hollow the projects spread into Highland Park and University Park, the two small cities that make up the Park Cities, where lot sizes are tighter but budgets are not and where a back garden has to thread between a 1920s Tudor and the neighbor's window twenty feet away.

By the middle of the 2010s the work was following the money north and west. Suburban Westlake, with its rolling caliche hills and big contemporary houses, gave the firm room for the kind of multi-phase estate plans that take years to finish. Southlake and Keller brought more of the same. These were not small backyards. They were properties where a homeowner wanted a pool, an outdoor kitchen, a motor court, and a garden that all looked like they belonged to one idea.

The firm still keeps a crew of its own installers, masons, and planting people, and it pulls in trade partners for the specialized pieces: pool plumbing, low-voltage lighting, irrigation control, ornamental ironwork. That structure lets the principals put the right team on each job without farming out the whole thing to a general contractor. On Houzz the firm carries a 4.9-star rating across more than 85 reviews, most of which talk less about the finished photos than about the fact that the people who designed the project were the same people who answered the phone during construction.

The design process

What sets the firm apart, and what its clients tend to mention first, is how a project starts. Before anyone talks about construction documents or pours a footing, Dickerson or Hunchik draws the thing by hand. Pencil on paper. The conceptual sketches and renderings come first, and they come early, so the homeowner can see the proportion of a terrace or the shape of a pool before a single dimension gets locked down.

This is not nostalgia. A hand drawing stays loose. It invites the client to push back, move a wall, ask for a wider lawn, before the design hardens into a CAD file that nobody wants to redraw. The principals will tell you a sketch communicates texture and mood in a way a slick computer rendering flattens out. Once the concept is settled, the project moves into proper construction documents, the grading, the drainage, the irrigation zones, the lighting plan, the stone schedule. Then the crew builds it.

The website keeps an archive of these sketches, grouped by style, and it reads like a tour of how Dallas houses actually look. There are French formal drawings with clipped parterres and a central axis. Contemporary plans with floating pool edges and rectilinear stone. Spanish colonial courtyards. Ranch and estate layouts for the big horse-country lots. Transitional modern work that splits the difference for the new-construction crowd. The range is the point. A firm that only does one look cannot serve a market this varied.

What the firm builds

Pools are a large part of the business, and the firm treats them as part of the landscape rather than a fiberglass shell dropped into a lawn. Designs run from infinity pools cantilevered off a Westlake hillside to geometric lap pools edged in cut limestone to family pools with sun shelves, raised spas, and stone coping. Water features show up often: a spillway wall, a sheer descent into the pool, fire bowls set on the deck. The pool, the patio, and the planting around it get drawn together so they read as one composition.

Outdoor living is the other big driver. Dallas summers are brutal, and a covered structure is what turns a backyard from a three-week-a-year amenity into something usable. The firm builds outdoor kitchens with built-in grills and refrigeration, pavilions and pergolas with deep overhangs to cut the afternoon sun, fireplaces and fire pits for the cool months, and lighting that makes the space work after dark. The pavilions are oriented to catch a breeze and shed the worst of the heat, because in this climate that detail decides whether anyone actually sits outside in July.

Then there is the hardscape, the stone and masonry bones of a project. Motor courts, entry drives, terraced patios, garden walls, retaining walls, outdoor stairs. Material choice tracks the house. Rough Oklahoma limestone and native fieldstone for the ranch and rustic work, cut Lueders limestone and travertine for the contemporary and transitional jobs, antique brick and Saltillo tile for colonial and Spanish homes. Underneath all of it the firm specs real drainage, which matters more here than almost anywhere. North Texas sits on expansive clay that swells and shrinks with every wet and dry spell, and a patio built without drainage and movement joints will crack within a few seasons.

Garden design covers the planting side. The firm does formal parterres with clipped hedging, loose perennial borders, native and adaptive schemes that get by on less irrigation, shade gardens tucked under the mature canopy of the older neighborhoods, and the occasional kitchen garden for clients who want to grow herbs and cut flowers. Plant sourcing runs through specialty Texas nurseries, and the firm will bring in large-caliper trees when a project needs shade on day one instead of in ten years.

For the biggest properties the firm offers full estate master planning. On a multi-acre lot the work rarely happens all at once. A master plan maps the whole build-out, the gates and motor court, the pool complex, the garden, a sport court or putting green, the service areas, so that each phase, built whenever the budget allows, still lines up with what came before. Sightlines hold. Grades match. Drainage and planting frameworks stay consistent even when phase three gets built four years after phase one. Plans like this have run across several seasons on properties in Westlake, Southlake, and the Stonebridge Ranch community up in McKinney.

Where the firm works

Original Landscape Concepts serves a wide swath of North Texas, but its center of gravity is the established money belt of Dallas and the high-end suburbs around it.

Inside the city, the firm works in Preston Hollow, Highland Park, and University Park, plus Bluffview and the Greenway Parks pocket, the Design District edge, and the leafy stretch around Turtle Creek. It does a good amount of work in Lakewood, the older neighborhood east of downtown that wraps around White Rock Lake and the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden, where the lots are deep and the tree canopy is heavy. There are projects in Kessler Park on the Oak Cliff side too. Further north within the city the firm covers Bent Tree, Northwood Hills, and Prestonwood, the comfortable older subdivisions strung along the Tollway.

In the suburbs north of Dallas the firm works in Plano, Allen, and McKinney, where custom-home neighborhoods generate steady demand, and it follows the new construction even further out to Frisco, Prosper, and Celina. Up there the master-planned communities, Windsong Ranch, Stonebridge Ranch, Newman Village, draw buyers who want an estate-grade yard to go with a brand-new house.

To the west the firm serves the mid-cities, Southlake, Keller, and Colleyville, along with Flower Mound and the bigger-acreage properties in Westlake, where the terrain rolls enough to make for some of the firm's most ambitious work.

Reception

The firm's 4.9-star Houzz rating, built on 85 or more reviews, is the most visible measure of its reputation. Reviewers tend to praise the same things: that the principals stay involved from the first sketch to the last plant, that the projects come in close to what was drawn, and that the crew is responsive when something needs adjusting mid-build. The firm also turns up consistently in Dallas searches for luxury landscape design, particularly around the Preston Hollow and Park Cities markets where much of its portfolio sits. None of that is far from where the company set up in 2008, which is rather the point: it has worked the same neighborhoods long enough to be known in them.

External links

• Original Landscape Concepts official website