Commercial Landscape Design
Commercial landscape is an operating cost before it's anything else. A design that looks good on paper can be expensive to keep alive, and the difference usually shows up two or three years in, when a plant list that needed constant intervention starts to fail and the site begins looking neglected. Add the constraints particular to commercial sites — municipal canopy and permeability requirements competing with stall counts, sightlines that have to stay clear for security and wayfinding, tenants and residents on site throughout construction — and the design problem is as much about maintenance, liability, and phasing as it is about how the property looks from the street.
Gardenia has been designing commercial landscapes across Metro Vancouver for over 40 years. That work includes office parks and business campuses, strata and multi-family developments, retail and ground-floor commercial frontages, and public and institutional sites — from concept through to permit-ready documentation and construction-phase consultation.
How we approach a commercial site. We design to the maintenance budget that will actually exist, not the one that exists during the first season. That means structure over seasonal display: hedging, evergreen mass, and durable groundcover carrying most of the site, with colour concentrated at entrances and other high-visibility points where it earns its cost. Circulation is resolved early, since a landscape that people walk around rather than through will show it within a year.
Documentation that gets built. Commercial projects pass through more hands than residential ones — architects, civil engineers, municipal reviewers, general contractors, maintenance crews. We produce permit-ready drawings coordinated with the rest of the consultant team, and we stay involved through construction. Four decades of hands-on installation experience means we know what a crew will actually do with a detail before it's drawn.
Landscape as an asset. For office and strata property, grounds are a visible signal of how well a building is run. For ground-floor retail, the frontage is what a customer registers before they register the tenant. Both are worth designing properly, and both cost more to fix later than to get right at the outset.
North Vancouver Office Park
Landscape that earns its keep. For commercial property, planting is an operating decision as much as an aesthetic one. This North Vancouver office park uses a restrained palette — clipped hedging, structural evergreen mass, seasonal colour concentrated at the entrance where it's actually seen — so the site looks maintained year-round without a maintenance budget to match.
Designed for the way people arrive. The courtyard reads clearly from the parking lot and from the street, giving tenants and visitors a defined entrance rather than a door in a wall. Windmill palms mark the threshold; low hedging organizes circulation without blocking sightlines, which matters for both wayfinding and site security.
Built around the constraints. Parking lot trees are placed to meet municipal canopy requirements while keeping stall counts intact — the kind of coordination that's easier to resolve in design than to negotiate later with a development permit reviewer.
West Vancouver Commercial Building
Small sites, high visibility. West Vancouver's commercial buildings often sit on tight lots with almost no ground to work with. Here, raised concrete planters do the work: they lift the planting to eye level from the sidewalk, define the entry, and separate pedestrians from the parking area without a fence.
Planting chosen for the setting. Lavender and low evergreen shrubs stay in scale with the building, tolerate reflected heat off paving and glass, and hold their form with minimal intervention, important on a site where every visitor sees the frontage before they see the tenant.
A frontage that supports the businesses inside. Ground-floor commercial depends on curb appeal in a way that office space doesn't. Design at street level is the first thing a prospective client or student registers about a tenant's business.
Contact
Serving Vancouver, the North Shore, and Metro Vancouver.
Call or email to discuss your project.
info@gardenialandscaping.com
604-250-8880
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