Many homeowners with large properties landscape the areas around the house and let the edges go wild. Not so these water-loving clients in Morada, Calif., who often host charity events for several hundred people at a time. When they looked out across their flat, featureless lot, they envisioned fountains, waterfalls, pools, and even a picture-perfect spot where their grown son, a pastor, could conduct weddings. Before they had even broken ground on their new home, they called Bill Goddard, president of Goddard Construction Services in Woodbridge, Calif., situated between San Francisco and the Sierra Nevada foothills, just south of Sacramento. At 4.2 acres, the ambitious project was one of the smallest that Goddard Construction Services has completed. Located in wine country, the full-service design/build landscape company specializes in work on vineyards and orchards 10 acres or more. Even so, this nondescript parcel required massive intervention. Goddard, who keeps numbers in his head, ticks off the statistics of the $3 million project: 665 truckloads of soil to sculpt the land, 750 tons of rocks to form the 125-foot-long waterfall course, 3,500 pieces of cast stone to build columns and walls, 330,000 gallons of water to fill four ponds and two streams, and enough decomposed granite to cover 1,700 feet of paths 6 ½ feet wide. “This client loves water, so we focused everything on water,” Goddard explains. “And when it comes to specific waterfalls, we want them to look like they’ve been there a million years. We want the contours of the project to tell you it makes sense that a waterfall is there.”
Despite the lack of naturally varied terrain, the property did have one redeeming feature: a neighboring stand of mature redwood trees. Goddard started there, borrowing the view as a backdrop and layering the property’s edges with more Sierra-type trees such as specimen redwoods and deodar cedar. The challenge was to remake nature from scratch, designing plantings and water elements that looked like they belonged. The design process continued with a paper sketch exploring all the view angles—from different rooms in the house out to the property, from within the landscape, and back to the house.
Designer/builder: Goddard Construction Services, Woodbridge, Calif.
