Anthony DeFranco is a landscaper and a licensed professional engineer with a consulting practice, and he receives phone calls on a daily basis for projects around Lake George. DeFranco Landscaping, along with DeFranco's consulting engineering business, were recently awarded the 2017 Irving Langmuir Award by The Fund for Lake George, which is given for excellence in development and stewardship, recognizing DeFranco's dedication to protecting Lake George by implementing Low-Impact Development (LID) practices.

He received a call in the summer of 2015 about renovating a heavily used and compacted lawn area into a landscaped outdoor wedding space on the grounds at Blue Water Manor Resort, which consists of six acres of forest area filled with restaurants, cottages, suites and cabins that overlook the lake. Their banquet facility room had been renovated in the winter of 2014, and they were now ready to draw more weddings to the property.

John Kelly, the owner, was looking to create a destination wedding location. He had the view of the lake on the existing lakefront resort property and now needed to renovate it to meet modern wedding event standards. His biggest challenge was that his daughter, Shannon, was going to have the first outdoor wedding on the new grounds in June of 2016. Kelly felt that having an event planned would help him and all parties involved keep to the deadline. He reached out to DeFranco Landscaping, Inc., about a year before his daughter's big day.

This flat lawn area was now going to be the focal point of the entire property. The proposed pathways had two functions - to accommodate golf cart traffic as well as serve as the processional aisle for the outdoor wedding area.

Putting It Together
Kelly's nephew constructed the timber wedding pergola and the many unique wooden railings found on the pavilion. DeFranco 's crew of 4 men built the segmental retaining walls and elevated paver patio area, while also renovating the "Grill," another section of the restaurant that would later function as an overflow area for the main restaurant.

With a very tight deadline and John's daughter 's wedding fast approaching, DeFranco's crew constructed the concrete paver walkways, planted all of the landscaped beds and laid fresh sod on the lawn areas.

"It is a tremendous improvement from what was here to what it looks like now," states DeFranco. "I had to pull out old pictures of all the mud in this area to remind our crew of how far we really came with this project."

The Reviews
Numerous iterations were completed during the design phase. "We were even making changes as we started the construction work," recalls DeFranco. "The scope of the work expanded to make sure the rest of the resort was integrated with the outdoor wedding area. Kelly has hit a home run with this. I can't tell you how many people came up the lakeside stairs to visit the restaurant for dinner when we were finishing up and just said 'Wow!,' and we knew that they had seen what it looked like before."

DeFranco's kids were about the only two people that expressed disappointment with the final product. Their first response as they viewed the completed area was: "What did you do with the pirate ship, Dadda? Don't you know that was the best part of coming here?" However, children do not have to worry; the playground will be returning in another location as the work continues in the future.