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Throughout the Twin Cities, Southview Design landscaping customers are enthusiastic about referring us to friends, neighbors, and family.
Landscape designers and architects from Southview Design share their knowledge and expertise with ideas, news, knowledge and trends.
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Landscape architecture is a multi-disciplinary profession that combines creativity and engineering with a passion for the natural world and designing beautiful spaces for people to enjoy. Meet two of the landscape architects on our team.
Meg Arnosti grew up in Boulder, Colorado and went to Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She holds a Master's Degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota. She has won numerous awards and specialized in creating simple, comfortable spaces, that connect the outdoor and indoors.
I love shaping a space to make it comfortable for people. Landscape Architects study the elements that make an outdoor space, like the boundaries, the canopy over your head, the proportions, the heights and the surfaces. My primary goal is to make a space that just feels “right.”
We studied a lot of drainage and grading, as well as construction documentation. Landscape Architects are licensed by the State to protect public safety, so we need to understand how to prevent water problems, how to build stairs, ramps, decks and patios within safety codes, and how to design creative drainage solutions. This is the mathematical part of the study.
Many people are surprised that I don’t get my hands dirty most of the time. We have great teams here at Southview, so I rely on the installation crews to do the heavy labor. This means that my plans need to be very accurate so the field crew can follow them. The installation still is an artistic creation, though, and I often am on the job site adjusting locations of plants or bed lines.
People also don’t realize that I spend a lot of time with construction details and pricing. I calculate how many tons of rock it will take to build a wall, or what the height of a pergola should be, or how to build the stairs going down a steep hill. Southview has a sophisticated pricing program with labor and materials built in, so I once I figure out quantities, I can switch out one material for another and show people the difference.
Justin Dorschied is an avid fan of all things Wisconsin and enjoys canoeing, trout fishing, and volleyball. He has worked in the landscape industry since 2001, as has been a licensed landscape architect as of February 2015.
My favorite part about being a landscape architect is having the ability to work with the natural environment and also developing creative solutions for challenging projects.
Finding time to study. Having been in the industry for a number of years and wearing a number of different hats during that time there was not much on the licensing exam that I had not already encountered in the real world. The best training is doing.
How little design we actually do. Although we do get the privilege of designing some amazing projects, a lot of time is spent on many other elements of design/build. Project management, estimating, billing, and meetings being what takes up a majority of my time when not designing.
Since 1978, we've completed over 8,000 landscaping projects in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Twin Cities area, and western Wisconsin. Learn more about us and our process.
From the initial meeting to the final walk through, our process is design to deliver a positive experience every time.
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