Landscape design & build, Peninsula & South Bay

One team designs and builds your project, so the plan, permits, budget and construction all stay under one accountable roof, with your completion date set in writing.

Focused refreshes start at $25,000, full yards around $50,000 and whole-property estate rebuilds around $180,000. Published completed projects on this site run from about $50,000 to $431,000. The map shows real completed ranges near you.

Yes, $25,000.

It depends on what has to be drawn, not on how large the budget is. For a single-family home, an unlicensed landscape designer may legally prepare conceptual layout drawings and planting plans. They may not prepare construction documents, details or specifications for any site, and they may not prepare plans of any kind that require grading or drainage. If your project moves earth, changes where water goes, or needs a stamped set for a plan check, it needs either a licensed landscape architect or a licensed landscape contractor designing the work that contractor will build. Sequoia is the second of those.

No. The Landscape Architects Technical Committee, which licenses landscape architects for the state, states that landscape designers are not licensed or regulated by the State of California. Anyone may use the title. That is not a reason to avoid them, but it does mean the license, the insurance and the workmanship record are yours to check, and it is why calling yourself a landscape architect without the license is a misdemeanor under Business and Professions Code section 5640.

Business and Professions Code section 5641.4 lets a California licensed landscape contractor design the systems and facilities for work that contractor will perform and supervise, including construction documents, drawings, specifications and details. The exemption is tied to building it. A C-27 contractor cannot sell you a plan set for somebody else to build, and that is the trade: you get drawings and a builder on one contract, or you get a designer whose drawings you then have to get bid.

A concept plan starts at $1,000, and the fee scales with the deliverables from there: a full master plan is commonly in the low thousands, and a complete documentation set for a large or complex property runs into the tens of thousands. The exact figure is quoted at the consultation, before you commit to either the design or the build. Each package includes two rounds of small revisions; beyond those, revisions are billed hourly at the rate stated in your design agreement. Design is priced and invoiced separately rather than being given away and buried in the build cost, which is how a free design usually gets paid for. If you enter into a construction contract with us within 30 days of your final design being delivered, an amount equal to the design fee is deducted from that contract.

Plan on starting the design two to three months before you want crews on site. The drawings themselves are the short part and move as fast as your selections and revisions do. Approvals are the long part: a straightforward HOA architectural packet commonly comes back in two to six weeks, and protected tree permits and plan check queue behind it rather than running alongside it. We sequence those against the completion date before the contract is signed rather than discovering them afterwards.

In San Mateo County the ordinance engages at 500 square feet of new landscape or 2,500 square feet of rehabilitated landscape. Below 2,500 square feet most residential projects can use the prescriptive compliance route, which sets fixed minimums such as four cubic yards of compost per 1,000 square feet and a three-inch mulch layer, rather than requiring a calculated water budget. Rehabilitated residential landscapes of 2,500 square feet and over must use the full performance approach. Cities adopt their own versions and some are stricter, so we confirm which applies to your address before drawing.

It will if your property sits in a State Responsibility Area or a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone. The Board of Forestry and Fire Protection approved the standards on 19 August 2026 and they take effect after Office of Administrative Law review. Inside the first five feet from the house they exclude bark mulch and wood chips, woody shrubs, new trees, combustible fences attached to the structure and stored firewood, leaving gravel, stone and paving, lawn or ground cover kept under three inches, and small non-woody plantings in spaced groups. New construction complies on completion and existing homes get a phased window. We check your property’s designation on the state maps before we draw the planting nearest the house.

Yes. The plan set is yours. We would rather win the build on the strength of the design, the written completion date and the price than by holding your drawings hostage.

Rarely, and we will say so early. The section 5641.4 exemption a C-27 contractor designs under is tied to performing and supervising the work, so a design-only engagement is either limited to what an unlicensed designer may prepare or belongs with a licensed landscape architect. If that is what your project needs, we will tell you at the consultation instead of selling you something that does not fit.