Real Estate
Email this story |
Print this story
More Headlines
July 1st, 2009
Rayner wins another award
By Mary Connell Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 19, 2006 4:39 PM PDT
Business Profile A weekly look at a Novato business This week: Rayner Landscaping
Four years after launching his landscape contracting business, Eric Rayner has won two of his industry's top regional awards. Novato-based Rayner Landscaping took first-place awards in the annual competition sponsored by the North Coast Chapter of the California Landscape Contractors Association. It was the only firm to win two first-place awards.
“This is really an honor for our whole team,” he said of his 11-member staff. “Every one of us goes to work each day with the mission of doing our best to craft top-notch, entertaining gardens.” One of Rayner's prize-winning designs - in the category of Small Residential Installations costing less than $30,000 - was for Paul and Diane Cordero's garden in the Hamilton area of Novato. The 20- by- 40-foot space includes an Asian guidepost, a cross bridge and soft, hidden lights. The other - for Best Xeriscape, or water-conserving garden - was for an installation at a San Rafael home. The judges inspected each of the installations.For Rayner, a Marin native whose mother described his room as a kid as a “jungle” - complete with Venus fly trap - the prizes are sweet confirmation of jobs well done and a business well run.
Magic also had something to do with it.
“I've been doing magic for 30 years,” Rayner said. Magic - that meshing of illusion and distraction - has heightened Rayner's awareness of placement and the importance of detail. “You look at a landscape as a stage. You're very conscious of angles and viewpoints, of a vantage point or points,” he says. One of the basics of landscape design, Rayner says, is determining how a garden space will be used: Do children and dogs need a lawn for romping? Does the client want a sunny spot to enjoy a cup of coffee and the morning paper or does she want a subtly, unobtrusively illuminated garden for post-sundown parties?
From the day he launched his business, his mission has been to design and build “entertaining gardens, aesthetically pleasing, that add to the quality of life.” It's always nice, he adds, to keep the family at home, “so they're not driving and their saving money. I'm like Walt Disney - I'm thinking about how people of every age can have fun.”
And he especially loves jobs in Novato - 90 percent of his clients are in Novato - because Novato has, among other attributes, the saving grace of being reasonably flat.
One Novato garden, an Asian design by Cliff Murata, features a large round granite water ornament. Water spills into it from a bamboo spout, lending both sound and tranquility to the backyard. Curving paths, elevated plantings, dry “streambeds” lined with hand-placed Mexican pebbles, copper and flagstone, a patio floor in a spiral design in soft grays - all create pleasing spaces and delight the eye. “Straight lines we avoid like the plague,” Rayner says.
Rayner says he returns whenever he can to a garden he built in Blithedale Canyon in Mill Valley. “One of my favorite things is to go to that job at nighttime,” when the lights hidden in trees and shaded inside the stone ornaments create just the right mood.
His family's place up by the Russian River includes something old and downright whimsical - an outdoor fireplace made of hundreds of old bottles, many set “catty-wampus,” that's been featured in Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not.” “Those are the things that make a yard special,” Rayner says. Too often, he says, homeowners think that low-water gardens with native plants - rather than an expanse of lawn - are unattractive. Not so, he says.
“Even though an area isn't heavily planted, it can still be a very bold, dramatic landscape,” he says. The San Rafael xeriscape - designed by landscape architect Theresa Zaro for an accountant with an eye for precision - features triangles in flagstone, as well as triangular plantings up a hillside.
Handsome, professional, well planted yards pay off, Rayner says. Homeowners avoid costly mistakes - like messy trees that can cause grief for the neighbors with a swimming pool - and typically result in a 100- to 200- percent return on their investment.
And those who think a landscape architect is an unaffordable luxury should realize that the professionals' fees represent about 5 percent of the cost of a landscaping project, Rayner said.
He is one of a handful of Marin County landscape contractors with a full-time landscape architect on staff. “There are only 5,000 licensed landscape architects in California. And in all of Marin County there are only four landscape architects who work for a single contractor.”
He credits Theresa Zaro, his architect and project manager, with creating great designs - including the prize-winning Hamilton garden.
Rayner also employs landscape designer Tom Wilhite, who created the winning San Rafael xeriscape garden. Wilhite is one of the senior editors of the Sunset Western Garden Book, the bible for gardeners, and the editor of 10 of Sunset's gardening books.
Rayner took the UC Berkeley Extension's course in garden design, has been certified by the Marin Municipal Water District's Water Efficient Landscape Program and is a consultant for the Marin Bolinas Botanical Garden. One of the joys of Rayner's work is sharing his love of plants and how to tend them. He volunteers his time with the Novato Streetscape Committee. “We design the medians for free and draw up the plant list. The city buys the plants and puts in the irrigation, then the neighbors do the planting and maintenance,” he says.
Rayner is an unstinting advocate of the UC Extension's Master Gardener program, which is offered in Novato. “They are a wonderful, intelligent group of people, a wonderful organization. The Master Gardener program trains people to use less pesticides and herbicides, to use integrated pest management techniques,” Rayner said. “When people spray, it kills all sorts of beneficial bugs.”
A licensed landscape contractor, Rayner earned his undergraduate degree in business and marketing at UC Berkeley and his MBA at Arizona State University. He was a solar systems contractor for many years. “I've always had an environmental bent,” he said.
Throughout all, he's never lost his love of plants.
“I'm always out in the yard,” he said. “Plants take care of you. They never argue with you. When you work with plants, you notice certain little things.”
Article Rating
Reader Comments
The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of NovatoAdvance.com.
Submit a Comment
We encourage your feedback and dialog; all comments will be reviewed by our Web staff before appearing on the Web site. Any material that is contrary to good taste, contains objectionable material, is not in compliance with community standards or does not meet the standards of the Advance, will not be posted to the Web site.
