Hire Your Landscape Architect First

The standard sequence has a building designed first and its grounds designed around whatever's left over: a habit of practice, not a rule of good design. Site conditions like grading, drainage, solar orientation, and existing mature trees should shape where a building sits and how it meets the ground, not the other way around. Owners who bring a landscape architect in at the same stage as their architect consistently end up with buildings that cost less to site, perform better environmentally, and read as one considered plan rather than a structure with landscaping added afterward.