The offering

A built in planter puts greenery where there is no soil: along a terrace edge, on a roof deck, against a boundary wall. Built properly it is waterproofed, drained and irrigated, so the plants live and the wall behind stays dry.

Flower boxes are the detail most often got wrong on an otherwise good terrace. A planter is a box of wet soil held against a building, and if it is not tanked and drained it will find its way into the wall behind it. The damp patch usually appears a season later, by which point the planting is established on top of the problem.

We build them in masonry, cast concrete or steel, tank the inside, install a drainage layer and a proper outlet, and run irrigation into each box before it is filled. A planter that has to be watered by hand is a planter that gets forgotten in January.

Depth is the other decision. A box deep enough only for annuals will not hold the clipped shrub or the olive on the drawing, and shallow soil on a hot terrace dries out within a day. We size the box for what is going into it, and where the structure limits depth we say so and change the planting rather than the physics.

Finishes match the building: plastered and painted, clad in stone, board formed concrete, or powder coated steel where the line needs to be thin.

What is included