Landscaping a Newly Built Home: When Should You Start?

The answer surprises most people: start the landscape design while the house is still in documentation, and start the landscape build the week the builder finishes. Every month of delay after handover costs more, not less.

Why design early

Finished floor levels, threshold heights, door and window positions, stormwater connection points, service conduits and driveway crossovers are all fixed by the house design. If the landscape is drawn at the same time, the external levels meet the house cleanly and conduits are run before the slab goes down. If it is drawn afterwards, you are cutting into new work to get power to the pool.

What to lock in during construction

• Threshold and finished external levels at every door
• Stormwater and drainage connection points and pit locations
• Conduits for garden lighting, irrigation, pool equipment and outdoor kitchen services
• Structural provision for decks, pergolas or screens fixed to the house
• Retaining and batters at the boundary before machinery access disappears

Access is the asset. Once the fences go up and the driveway is poured, every cubic metre of soil costs three times as much to move.

The access window

While the site is still a construction site, an excavator can reach the rear yard. After handover, on a typical Sydney block with 900mm side access, the same excavation becomes a wheelbarrow job. Scheduling bulk earthworks, pool excavation and heavy material delivery in that window is the biggest single saving available on a new-build landscape.

Staging when the budget is stretched

Most new-build clients cannot fund the house and the full garden at once. We stage it: design everything, build the structural and buried work first - levels, retaining, drainage, conduits, paving base - then bring back planting, lighting, decking and the outdoor kitchen in later stages. Staging works when the whole thing was designed as one project.

Soil and turf on new sites

New-build yards are usually compacted subsoil with builder's rubble through it. Nothing grows in it. Rippling, removal, imported profile soil and proper preparation is not an optional line item - it is the difference between a lawn that establishes in six weeks and one that never does.