<font color=red>ON THE ROAD</font> Crash Course in Design

“Good design is like smoke,” says Tim Thoelecke Jr., founder of the American Academy of Landscape Design, Glenview, Ill. “It has a presence, you can recognize it, but you can’t always get a grasp of what exactly it is.” At Wednesday’s AALD Landscape Design Workshop, Thoelecke sought to help landscape designers gain a better understanding of good design’s intangibility. He focused on design as a process and designers can make their work look more like extensions of their clients’ homes rather than afterthoughts.
 
About 30 industry members – including practicing designers, prospective designers and students – sat in on the three-hour session that focused primarily on residential design. Armed with pencils, tracing paper, architect’s scales and other designers’ tools, attendees listened to Thoelecke’s thoughts on design in addition to trying their hand at creating design solutions for a real-life property. 
 
Thoelecke, who ran Garden Concepts, his own Chicago-area landscape design/build firm for nearly 20 years, closed his business two years ago to found the AALD. During the growing season he works for Schmechtig Landscapes, Mundelein, Ill., a $10-million, full-service landscape company, and he teaches during the off season. Thoelecke is a past president and certified member of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, has contributed to the book “This Old House Complete Landscaping” and has projects featured in a number of consumer magazines including Better Homes & Gardens. He also recently was featured on HGTV’s Landscaper’s Challenge.
 
Thoelecke’s background is design – not horticulture – with a bachelor’s degree in landscape design and “total emersion” education in design from London’s Inchbald School of Design. Good landscape design, he says, is not about the plants, but rather about the “bones” of a plan. “Sometimes we lose the forest for the trees,” he says. “But good design isn’t about the plants, it’s about space.”
 
n abomination of a design,” Thoelecke says, giving the example of someone who peppers their yard with lawn ornaments. “That might be creative, but it’s not good design,” he says.
 
More than anything else, “Design is a process,” Thoelecke emphasizes.
 
After hearing some of Thoelecke’s thoughts on design, attendees “deconstructed” two residential landscape plans borrowed from Chicago-area firm Milieu Design. The goal of this exercise was to present opportunities for connecting the landscape to the architecture – a strategy that creates transitions and “hold spaces together.”
 
“Look for important views in certain spaces in the house: kitchen table, bay windows, entry foyer and master bedroom,” Thoelecke says. Using straight-edge tools, that’s what attendees did. They drew lines extending from various points of the home outward into the landscaping, looking for connections, such as a windows with sight lines leading to outdoor living spaces, or pathways leading to eye-catching ornamental trees or groups of plantings.
 
Thoelecke reminded designers about the top three things real estate agents and homebuyers are looking for in landscapes:

• Curb appeal,
• Outdoor living spaces, and
• Privacy.

These are all areas of opportunity, and designers should create solutions for their clients accordingly, Thoelecke says. He also encouraged designers to probe deeper when clients seem to know what they want. For example, if a client suggests three arborvitae in one area, be sure to ask whether they really want arborvitae, or whether they’re just looking for privacy. That way, the designer can evaluate if what the clients are asking for best serves the problem they’re trying to solve.
 
Next, Thoelecke gave attendees a profile of a client and two plans (a backyard and a front yard), and put them to work for an hour. With the instructions not to focus on specific plant species, but rather to connect the landscape to the architecturally uninteresting brown stone home and suit the clients’ needs, each designer created plans for the neatnik divorced father who frequently works from home. Thoelecke also shared that the client likes gardening, birds and water features (but didn’t want to maintain one).
 
After the exercise, several attendees shared their designs, revealing many proper solutions, like bird- and butterfly- attracting plant types, privacy-creating shrubbery and a pondless waterfall to satisfy the client’s interest without the maintenance issue.
 
Thoelecke applauded the designers’ efforts, and encouraged the entire group to use logic and motivation for every element of a landscape vs. “decorating.” “If there is logic behind things – and you’re not putting something somewhere ‘for interest’ – you’ll feel much more confident explaining it to a client,” he says. “Your designs become defensible.”