With the inconsistent topography in the Colorado Springs area, retaining walls can be a necessary item in your yard design. Retaining walls can be used to maximize the usability of sloped space, create planting opportunities, eliminate soil erosion and provide aesthetic appeal. The variety of materials available for retaining walls allows for customization as well as a wide variety of price points. Contact Landscape FX to get more information on the many options available.

Features include:

• Natural stone walls
• Stone veneer walls
• Block retaining walls

Retaining Walls: Preventing Erosion While Decorating Your Landscape

Among other things, Colorado’s unique topography offers wonderful landscaping opportunities. One such opportunity is the use of retaining walls to transition between different ground elevations, separate yards features, and prevent erosion. For those with sloped or hilly yards, the benefits of building a retaining wall include not only aesthetic enhancement but functional use as well. We design and install residential as well as commercial retaining walls to enhance or correct your landscape.

Retaining walls serve many purposes from protecting land to creating usable space. Constructed correctly, they hold back earth, and even water, for decades without problem or maintenance. Retaining walls can be constructed with wood, natural stones, or interlocking blocks, which are essentially wall systems that require no mortar and have a more manicured look.

Here are just some of the benefits and uses a retaining wall can offer:

• Create vertical gardens – ideal for sites with limited space or dramatic changes in grade, a retaining wall offers the opportunity to create gardens built in, around, or off a retaining wall.
• Expand usable space on hillsides – by leveling a hillside with the aid of retaining walls, you can increase the number of places you can relax and play in an otherwise unusable area.
• Create terracing – great for bigger hills, terracing can be a multifunctional enhancement to your landscape with one level a garden, the other a sitting, and the next a play area.
• Noise abatement – a retaining wall can block road and city noises.
• Privacy – retaining walls can provide seclusion from prying eyes.
• Prevent erosion – keeps soil in place and avoid washouts.
• Prevent flooding – retaining walls break up slopes and redirect water.
• Improve drainage – a well-designed retaining wall can incorporate a drainage system to control water flow.
• Add home value – through all the benefits of the above!

Retaining Wall Design

Environmentally, retaining walls can serve an important function too. With our extreme Colorado weather we can go from being dried out one week, to being saturated the next, and if your landscape is not designed to optimize water-flow in and around your yard, flooding, washouts, and pooling can occur. Retaining walls can be used as a great tool in preventing these hazards.

Where terrain is hilly, the opportunity for erosion exists. And, erosion can adversely impact any landscape in more than one way. For example, soil and its contents can wash away into storm water sewers and stream into waterways depleting your lawn and gardens of valuable nutrients that keep them healthy. Additionally, erosion can present safety concerns. Not only can water rushing off a slope carry away valuable natural elements, but it can impede walkways and roadways, result in flooding, and threaten structural foundations. Properly designed and built, a retaining wall will keep soil where it should be, and direct water flow evenly across your landscape preventing hazards.

Types of Retaining Wall Designs and Uses

• Brick, wood, stone, stone veneer, block and concrete
• Decorative boulder walls
• Retaining walls for seating and surrounds
• Rock landscaping walls
• Shoreline boulder walls
• Boulder outcroppings

Commercial Retaining Walls

Do you have a commercial retaining wall need? That usually means you wish to level a larger area requiring higher and stronger retaining walls. Additionally, proper water run-off, drainage and erosion control must be considered. In other words, before you can have a well-built retaining wall you must have a well-engineered retaining wall designed. You’ll also want a retaining wall design that aesthetically fits with, complements and enhances your surrounding property. Local building codes will often mandate multiple tiered retaining walls versus a tall single spam. Designing multi-level retaining walls optimally can provide you with a significantly larger usable level area. We can also reduce your recurring upkeep and watering costs by incorporating low maintenance but attractive landscaping or xeriscaping into your terraces and surrounding “green” areas.

None of this is work for beginners! Landscape FX has been designing, engineering and building commercial retaining walls in the Colorado Springs area for over a dozen years. We welcome the opportunity of showing you how your commercial retaining wall can be both better engineered and functionally attractive!

Professional Retaining Wall Installation and Design

Designing and building a retaining wall is an involved process. And, bigger projects can be subject to building codes. Landscape FX has a team of professionals with the experience and equipment necessary to build a beautiful and functional retaining wall for you. With a landscape designer and engineer on our staff, we know the mechanics behind designing and constructing retaining walls and take into account factors such as drainage, grade, and existing landscaping.

Call Landscape FX today for a quote on adding a retaining wall to your property at (719)439-3169.