Landscape Architect Articles

Intricate Out-of-the-Box Wall01-11-17 | Feature

Intricate Out-of-the-Box Wall
By Michael Miyamoto, LC/DBM

Photos: Dennis Mullane III

Mullane and Company, McLeansville, N.C., designed and built this wall at a home in nearby Greensboro, N.C. The homeowner asked the landscaper to build a new and wider driveway, and to also build the wall on a strip of bare dirt next to the driveway. The wall is 80 feet long and 7 feet tall. The columns are 16 inches square, the base is 12 inches thick, and the main body of the wall is 8 inches thick. The unfinished wall is shown above, while the finished product is pictured on the opposite page. The client wanted the wall to be painted from the outset.

Most brickwork uses a running bond, where bricks are laid end-to-end, with staggered joints. This wall has a Flemish bond pattern, whose prominent feature is the bricks that are perpendicular to the end-to-end bricks. In this 8"-thick wall (two rows of 4"-wide end-to end bricks), the perpendicular bricks protrude from it on both sides because two 8"-long bricks, instead of the usual one, were used for the perpendicular portions. These are termed batts. The rounded bricks along the top of the wall were custom-made and cost about three times more than regular bricks. The builder chose to use a double bullnose style. The column caps were custom molded by Pine Hall Brick, Winston-Salem, N.C.

A lead statue of Pan, bought by the homeowners while on a trip to Charleston, S.C., sits on a corbel shelf, which had to be built one layer at a time, from the bottom up. This took about four days to complete.

Dennis Mullane III, RLA, ASLA, said 20,000 to 30,000 bricks were used for the wall. The painting was done by hand with brushes. But this could not be done until the mortar had cured, which took a couple months. The wall was built from end-to-end, not one section at a time. For the footing, a backhoe was used to create a trench, about 12"-14" in depth and about 2' in width. The concrete footing was reinforced with rebar. Tim Diachenko, of TKD Management, LLC, Greensboro, N.C., put in the plants.

The builder of this wall came up with an innovative, yet effective, design scheme, for this wall at a home in Greensboro, N.C. Mullane and Company completed the project, and had to build the wall because the homeowners wanted a new street entrance and a wider driveway.

"We had the line surveyed and asked the neighbor if we could intrude on their property for the footing that would be a few inches over the line," said Dennis Mullane, RLA, ASLA, CLARB and owner of the design-build firm, based in McLeansville, N.C. "The actual wall would be one inch from the property line. There would be no above ground encroachment issues. The neighbor agreed."

The owner of the company made several trips to Charleston and Savannah to sketch and photograph walls in those cities, and that's how he came up with the design for the wall in Greensboro. He made a composite of varying walls to produce what he thought was the best in that style.

Some walls like this are constructed with the columns first, followed by the panels in between those columns. "This always results in a wall with no straight horizontal lines and no brick tie-in to the columns," the owner said. "This is often done with the best man building the column leads, and then the crew comes to fill in. Almost always, this results in a bad wall."

The owner of the design-build firm said he had never seen this type of wall done before, but thought it would look good. "How could it look bad if the craftsmanship is good?" he asked. This particular wall was one of the most expensive the owner has built in his 40-year career, he noted, and a simple 8-inch wall in a regular pattern would cost rc helicopter less than half of this intricate one.

He said he always asks his clients for their input on projects, the more, the better. "I like to put the flavor and style of the people I work for into the design," he said. "The more involved they are, the more successful the end product will be."

The company was started in 1975 in Greensboro, N.C., and the owner became a registered landscape architect in 1977. The firm has always been a designer/builder. It is a small outfit, and 90 percent of its business is residential design/build, and 10 percent commercial construction management.

"We keep the functions separate," he said. "We design projects that are built by others, mostly out of state, and we also build projects that are designed by other landscape architects. We are a small company and foster relationships with other craftsmen and designers. Our project manager has been with us since 1979."

As seen in LC/DBM magazine, January 2017.