Great Gable

This was my second project after hanging out my own shingle in 2010. A landscape designer I'd worked alongside for years brought me in on a private estate backing onto the Georgian Bay Club — the kind of site where the surroundings set the standard before you've laid a single stone. His trust meant everything at that stage. I wasn't about to waste it.

The property wanted for nothing on paper. What it needed was stone that could hold its own against the scale of the site — an ornamental waterfall, a naturalistic boulder stream, limestone slab steps all around and the feature the clients called "the claw" — a stone pathway that reaches out and leads you right to the water's edge. Three to four months on the ground.

The clients wrote afterward that it had become their own private vacation resort. That's the only review that matters.

Landscape Ontario Award of Excellence — Residential Construction $100,000–$250,000, 2014