The Same House, Made New Again: A Landscape Renovation in Auburn, AL
When a client chooses to keep an old house instead of starting over, the outdoor space should live up to that decision.
We’ve worked with this client for more than a decade now, across several Auburn, AL homes and a place at the lake. This is our fourth major landscape design project together, and we are honored to have that kind of relationship. When they bought this house in the heart of Auburn, they called us to start on the landscape while the builder renovated the home. We already had a good sense of how they like to live outdoors and what would work for their family, so the two projects moved forward together and finished at the same time. That history shaped the design before we drew a line, and it meant we spent less time explaining our approach and more time building it.
A Problem Worth Solving First
The street here is narrow, the kind where two cars meet and one has to think about it. Guests parking along the road created a problem for the house and for the neighbors, and no amount of planting was going to fix that. To help fix the problem, we added a gravel parking area at the road. It was sized and sited to take cars off the street without turning the front of the property into pavement. The parking area had to work for everyday use and still feel like part of the property rather than an afterthought that just got added.
It’s a small addition, but the family notices it every time they have people over.
A Piece of the Original House
The old driveway brick had been on the property a long time, and it had a color and wear that only comes with age. That kind of look is something that we wanted to shine through in the new driveway design.
Rather than haul the brick off and bring in all new material, we pulled it up, cleaned it, and set it in a herringbone pattern along the edge of the new drive. It’s how the house’s original character carries through into the new hardscape.
The Finished Landscape
Walk the property today and nothing about the new work stands out. The parking area looks like it was part of the original plan. The brick in the new drive looks like it’s always been there.
That was the goal from the start. The house was worth keeping, and the Auburn landscape design needed to feel like it belonged to it, not like something added on later. The details that make a property feel established aren’t always new. Sometimes they were already there.
