LOCATION: Oak Island, N.C.
COMPANY: Element Outdoor Living
DETAILS: It may seem counterintuitive, but the scenic beaches of a place like Oak Island don’t always make for the easiest landscaping jobs. In fact, the existing house and landscaping at this oceanfront residential property required a complete teardown and redo to meet the client’s visionary ideas and combat harsh environmental conditions.
Blair Walton, founder and CEO of Element Outdoor Living (EOL) and the designer for this project, said creating a landscape that could face the issues of a long, thin property against a salt-spraying ocean and sandy soil took a lot of collaboration, creative thinking and hard work.
“The pieces of the puzzle were really a strong collaboration between myself, the architect and the homeowner who has a lot of really cool visions and likes to do stuff a little different and push the limits,” Walton says.
Those differences include moving the house closer to the street than neighboring properties to allow for a great view down the rest of the peninsula, filling the property with pathways and tall, weather-resistant vegetation and adding a long, linear pool.
Restoring the dunes — a property located just across the street — was another big goal. The plot, initially reserved for more construction, was not much more than dirt and weeds, but Walton says they added rolling hills, a zoysia meadow and walking trails to perfect the client’s vision for a park-like private area.
With all this, EOL won a gold award from the National Association of Landscape Professionals’ Awards of Excellence program for this project.
