2009 VA ASLA Awards

Award of Excellence - Charles Luck Stone Center

Award of Excellence 

Project: Charles Luck Stone Center
Landscape architect:  Nelson Byrd Woltz
Architect: Glave and Holmes Associates
Client: Luck Stone Corporation
Contractor: KBS

Luck Stone wanted to create a new kind of design center that encouraged client interaction and involvement with members of its own design center team while maintaining its contractor sales business. As a result, the company hired a design team comprised of a landscape architect, an architect, an interior designer, a civil engineer, and a graphic designer to collaborate and help create a new vision and environment for marketing and sale of their architectural stone products.

While the building program remains the same for each Design Center location, the landscape must respond to a number of different variables and site constraints. The challenge for each landscape design is to express the inherent qualities of each site or region through plants and stone selections. Each is an opportunity to demonstrate environmental stewardship to the public through the design and installation of sustainable stormwater management strategies including bioswales, rain gardens, retention ponds and native plantings.

The collection and retention of stormwater on site was an important consideration in the design. Using rain gardens with plantings of native groundcovers to capture drainage from the building roof and from parking lots allows the stormwater to slowly percolate, reducing runoff and recharging the aquifer and improving water quality.

The Charles Luck Stone Center with demonstration gardens of stone and native plants was designed for clients and customers of Luck Stone. These gardens became opportunities for the landscape architect to demonstrate a high level of craft in stone detailing while creating a series of minimalist garden courts evoking a contemporary sculpture garden. The entire site was imbued with qualities of a sculpture or botanic garden to delight the senses and inspire customers with potential ideas for the use of stone - from playful to pragmatic, while displaying the range of stone products offered by Luck Stone.  The gardens were designed so they could be viewed collectively from afar, from inside the building, or sequentially from a linear stone walkway that threads through the individual gardens.

In addition to the demonstration gardens, we approached the 11-acre site as a series of landscape spaces and garden rooms that were defined with nearly all native species that are hardy to the area and more sustainable to maintain than exotic species. Trees establish a framework to organize the site, provide shade for visitors and help mitigate the dust from truck traffic in the contractor yard. Plants were selected to establish a narrative of the design.

The significance of this project was designing demonstration gardens and stone pallet display area that has become a regional destination for homeowners, contractors and design professionals. The Demonstration Gardens and stone constructions on the site go beyond the mere purpose of stone commerce. They have become stylized stone laboratories, a teaching tool to learn about and appreciate the myriad qualities of stone. An unintended consequence of this designed landscape that suggests how successful and flexible the gardens spaces have become are the events and parties that are hosted there. In addition to learning about stone, visitors can learn about the environment, native plants of the region and innovative stormwater strategies.