Designer vs DIY: when do you actually need a landscape designer?
It’s the third summer and the garden has stopped being a project.
The paving has gone soft at the edges where the thyme has crept over it. The hedge you planted at knee height now shields the table from the neighbour’s window, and you no longer think about the neighbour’s window. There’s a shadow line across the lawn at seven in the evening that falls in exactly the same place it fell last year, and you know it will fall there next year too, because somebody worked out where the tree had to go.
Nobody standing in it can see any of the work. The path is wide enough for two people without anyone deciding it should be, the steps land where your feet already wanted to go, and the whole thing looks like it grew there.
Quick answer: Design it yourself when the site is flat, the area is small, and the job is mostly planting you’re happy to adjust as you go. Bring in a designer once you have a level change, anything structural, more than one trade on site, or a build you want staged over several years. Published guides put design fees at 5 to 20% of the build cost, or roughly [USD] $700 to $3,000 for a standalone plan.
But that garden doesn’t come without your input – and for a good number of projects, your input is all it takes. So here’s an honest run at where the line sits.
When is doing it yourself the right call?
More often than a designer will usually admit.
If your site is flat, or close to it, a lot of what a designer gets paid for has already been solved for you. Levels are where most of the hard thinking goes, and a flat garden hands you the answer free.
The rest of the DIY green lights:
The area is small. One courtyard, one strip along a fence, one bed. Mistakes are cheap to pull out and cheap to redo.
The work is planting rather than building. No walls, no drainage, no power, no water, nothing that needs a permit or an engineer.
You’re doing it in stages and you like it that way. Plenty of good gardens have been made one weekend at a time, by someone learning as they go, and the learning is half of why they enjoy it.
You already know what you like. If you can point at four gardens and say what you’d take from each, you have most of a brief. Some people just want someone to hold the pen.
The tools have also got better. Planner 5D lets you draw a plan in 2D and see it in 3D, with a free tier that covers roughly half the object library. SketchUp Free runs in a browser and came out of architecture, so it will handle levels if you’re prepared to learn it. iScape puts plants and paving onto a photo of your own garden on a phone. Home Outside is the friendliest drag-and-drop of the lot. None of them will tell you your idea is wrong, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on the day.
Where does DIY design usually come unstuck?
At the level change, nearly every time.
The moment a site slopes, three questions arrive together and they can’t be answered separately. Where does the water go. How do you get from the top to the bottom on foot. What holds the earth back while that happens. Answer them one at a time, in the order you happen to think of them, and you end up building a wall you then have to drill through.
Retaining walls are where this gets expensive. The standard failure is a wall stacked on an uncompacted base and backfilled with the same clay that came out of the hole. Two or three winters later the water pressure has nowhere to go, the blocks shift, and the wall leans. Retrofitting drainage behind a finished wall is expensive, and a full rebuild sits somewhere between $5,000 and $40,000 depending on size and material. That’s before any patio or planting on top of it comes out.
Three more places it goes wrong that have nothing to do with structure:
Plant size in year eight. The commonest DIY error is spacing for how a garden looks on planting day. Nurseries sell you a plant at 40cm and your eye fills the gaps. Five years on, half of it is coming out.
Money in the wrong order. Somebody spends the whole budget on paving and has nothing left for the screening that would have made the paving usable. A plan forces the argument about priorities before the first invoice, not after the last one.
Quotes you can’t compare. Without a drawing, every contractor prices a different garden. Three quotes come back at wildly different numbers and none of them are for the same job, so the cheapest one wins by being the least complete.
What does a landscape design actually cost?
Our prices for a master plan start at $4500. Entry-level concept plans start at $1800, with residential projects toward the higher end because they’re small and fiddly and commercial ones lower.
What decides it is the size of the build behind the fee. On a $15,000 garden a $3,000 plan is a fifth of everything you have. On a $150,000 build the plan might be $12,000 and it’s the 8% that determines whether the other 92% is spent well.
What do you get for the fee that an app won’t give you?
A decision, mostly. And a document.
An app will draw whatever you tell it to. It will happily show you a pergola sitting where the drain runs, and it will render it beautifully. What it won’t do is walk your site, read where the water goes in a downpour, notice that your back door is 400mm above the lawn, or tell you the thing you’re set on is a bad idea.
Beyond the judgement, the deliverable does real work of its own:
A drawing every contractor prices against, so three quotes are three prices for the same garden.
A staging plan, if the build has to happen over three years. Which order things go in, what has to be in the ground before the machine leaves, where the services run so you’re not cutting the paving open in year two.
A planting scheme sized for maturity rather than for the day it goes in, with the same plant repeated enough times to read as a scheme instead of a collection.
A 3D view before anything is built, which is where most of the arguing gets done. Cheaper to move a wall on screen than in the ground.
Is there a middle option between the two?
Yes, and it’s the one most people should be asking about.
A concept design gives you the layout, the levels thinking and the planting approach without the full documentation set. You get the decisions made and the drawing to work from, then you build it yourself, or hand it to a landscaper, or sit on it for two years until the money’s there.
A full design adds the detail a contractor needs to build it without ringing you every second day: setting-out dimensions, materials, specifications, planting schedules.
Plenty of gardens get the concept done professionally and everything after that handled by the owner. On a modest budget that’s usually the best split of the two.
Distance doesn’t decide it either. Design travels. Survey, levels, photographs and video of a site can be worked from anywhere in the world, and the review happens on a screen whether the designer is in the next suburb or on the other side of the planet.
A quick test before you decide
Run down these. If you answer yes to two or more, a design will probably pay for itself.
Does the site drop more than about half a metre across the area you’re working on?
Is anything structural going in? A wall, deck, pool, roof, or anything needing consent?
Will more than one trade be on site?
Do you want to build it in stages over more than a year?
Is the build budget large enough that a 5 to 10% design fee is smaller than the cost of getting the layout wrong?
Have you already started twice and changed your mind twice?
All no’s, and you should keep your money and open a design app.
Common questions
Can I get a designer to check a plan I’ve already drawn?
Many will, as a paid review, and it’s a cheap way to find the one problem you can’t see. Ask what form the feedback comes in. A marked-up drawing is more useful than a phone call you’ll half remember.
If I use a designer, do I have to use their contractor?
No, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. A design should be buildable by any competent landscaper. Ask up front whether the designer takes a commission on the build, because that answer changes how you read their recommendations.
How detailed does my brief need to be before the first conversation?
Photos of the site, a rough sense of budget, and four or five images of gardens you like, with a line on what you like about each. The gaps get filled in the conversation.
What if I only want help with the planting?
That’s a real scope. Ask for it by name. Layout and planting are separable, and if the bones of your garden are already right, a planting plan on its own is a much smaller job.
Does a design still make sense if I’m not building for three years?
It’s arguably better. A plan you’re going to build slowly is the one most likely to drift without a drawing, and it lets you order and stage the expensive parts when it suits you rather than when the machine turns up.
Most gardens don’t need a designer. The ones that do tend to know it already, usually because they’ve stood at the top of a slope with a tape measure and run out of ideas.