Design Company of the Month:
Topaz Design Group

Designing Outdoor Living Spaces

Summer is the time of year when the warm, inviting weather beckons people outdoors to enjoy the comforts of the season by spending time in the sun, in the water, or at a barbecue with family and friends. A thoughtfully designed landscape with lush plantings, a pool, a waterfall and an outdoor kitchen make it possible to practically live outdoors in a dreamlike setting, and Topaz Design Group can help create this kind of paradise in your own backyard.

Topaz's founder Adam Myles's interest in landscape design was sparked when he worked for a Long Island nursery as a teenager. His desire to layer colors and textures in exotic softscape plantings, and to use a wide variety of hardscape materials in complementary ways evolved into a passion to create beautiful outdoor living spaces. He adds, "After a few seasons working at the nursery, I started to do some installations myself, and then I left after about two years and went on my own." Since then, Myles has become one of New York's most influential landscape designers.

When asked about his design style, Myles explains, "I like freeform and more of a natural look. Every now and then, we get people who want something more formal, which we can do, but it just seems that through the years as the company has grown, the people who are looking to our work are looking for a specific style. At that point we want to see what their needs are, how much space we have to work with, and then we design something for them. We work with anything outside the house in the way of landscape, masonry, plantings and carpentry. We build pergolas and pavilions. When it comes to outdoor living, we can do just about anything."

Using various types of stone is an integral part of the design process at Topaz, and each material is meticulously chosen for every project to invoke a sense of aesthetic harmony between home and property. "On the patios we use a lot of bluestone from New York and Pennsylvania. Some people prefer natural cleft which has more texture, whereas other people like thermal which is much smoother on the surface. In our waterfalls, we use a lot of moss rock and natural boulders as opposed to anything that's cut in a quarry, since they appear to come right out of the forest and that seems to work well with our style of design. We also use travertine and crab orchard stone. There is such a wide range of colors to use. We probably do fifty-fifty between the cooler colors and the warmer ones. We'll use a lot of lot of bluestone, but travertine is a big thing right now because people like the honey colors, the off-whites and the beiges. We probably do the most work with concrete pavers; out of ten jobs, probably seven will use concrete pavers, the other three use stone."

"We just finished a few projects in the last week or so. One project was a complete backyard exterior with a built-in swimming pool, patio, water feature, a complete landscape. That's really our staple job, we love to go in and do an entire rear yard or an entire property on a residence. Another project we just did was a sunken driveway with retaining walls to each side and walkways leading to the back of the residence with a patio, retaining walls, sitting walls, a water feature and landscape. So rather than just doing a patio or a set of steps, we like to get involved with a project where we're doing everything from the hardscape to the softscape."

As the company has expanded, Myles has cultivated a select team of professionals that has worked together for decades. "We have various crews, we have actual carpenters on staff, masons and planting crews. I handle all the appointments, I do all the designs and oversee all the outside operations of the company. Then I have foremen who handle different aspects of the job, who do masonry or who are in charge of planting. I actually go and handpick all the shrubbery myself. Right now anything in ornamental grasses is popular, flowering perennials, things like that are very popular. I don't like to just call a nursery and give them a list. It's not the way we operate."

"Right now, even with the economy slowing, we're doing quite a bit of complete home living areas in backyards, whether it's a large patio, maybe a pond or water feature and outdoor livingrooms and kitchens, fire pits, fireplaces. It seems as if people are going to try to conserve and not go away on vacation, they are still spending money on renovating their backyards and staying home and enjoying themselves."

"We do a lot of outdoor kitchen units. In a standard ten or twelve-foot unit, there will be a grill, refrigerator, trash bin and storage compartments with drawers. In most cases we use granite on the top. There are some people who want bluestone or another type of stone. Some people will have a standard unit done, or others have it extend into another section where there will be a service bar with a countertop so you can have storage on the inside and then people can sit on the opposite side. Whenever we have situations like that, we have a licensed electrician come in who designs all the lighting and installs electric in different areas. When we do our stone work, we generally work on top of poured concrete with wire mesh reinforcement and then just add some sand for leveling purposes. We do everything on poured concrete so it's never going to move."

When asked about his favorite thing about being a landscape designer, Myles replies, "When you have a customer who really puts their faith in you and lets you make their home beautiful, and the end result is that they're happy, that's very nice."