Design before dirt
Grade, drainage, and sightlines get resolved on paper. Changing a line on a drawing costs nothing; moving a retaining wall costs thousands.
Since 2017
We Build Gardens We Would Want to Live With.
Terravana started with one crew, one truck, and a conviction that most landscape work fails because nobody stays around long enough to see how it grows in.
Our story
Eleven Years of Learning What This Soil Will and Will Not Do.
We began in 2017 doing maintenance on a handful of properties in Austin. It was unglamorous work, and it taught us the thing that still shapes every project: you learn more about a landscape by maintaining it for three years than by designing a hundred.
So we built the company backwards from most. Maintenance first, then installation, then design: each one informed by what we had already watched succeed or fail on real Central Texas properties.
A plan that ignores how a place will be cared for is a drawing, not a design.
Today we run our own crews across every discipline. No brokered labour, no handoffs to a company you have never met. The people who draw it are the people who build it, and often the people who come back to prune it.
What we hold to
Four Things We Will Not Trade Away.
Right plant, right place
Natives and proven adapted species selected for this heat and this alkaline soil, not whatever the nursery has surplus of.
Water is not free
Every design assumes restrictions will come, because they will. Zoned irrigation, deep mulch, and planting that can take a dry August.
Say the hard thing early
If a budget will not carry the idea, or a slope will not hold the plan, you hear it at the estimate, not halfway through.
How we got here
From One Truck to Four Disciplines.
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2017
Founded on maintenance
One crew, one truck, eleven properties in central Austin. We learned the soil the slow way.
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2017
Installation brought in-house
After one subcontracted patio failed in its second winter, we stopped brokering labour entirely.
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2019
Design studio opens
Our first full-time designer joins, and every project begins with a scaled plan rather than a sketch on a tailgate.
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2022
Water management division
Drought and tightening restrictions made irrigation and drainage a discipline of its own, not an afterthought.
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Today
240+ properties, one standard
Four disciplines under one roof, and the same crews who install a garden still coming back to care for it.
Who you will work with
Four Roles, on Every Project.
You will meet all of them. None of them will hand you to someone you have not met.
Principal Designer
Walks your property, draws the plan, and stays on the job through installation.
Installation Lead
Runs the crew on site, sequences the trades, and answers your questions in person.
Water Systems Specialist
Designs the irrigation zones and drainage before a single bed is shaped.
Maintenance Foreman
Inherits the designer's notes and keeps the garden on plan for years afterwards.
Licensed, insured, accountable
The Paperwork Nobody Enjoys, Kept Current Anyway.
Ask any contractor for these before you sign. If they hesitate, that is your answer.
- Texas Dept. of Agriculture
- TDA #0000000
- General liability
- Licensed & fully insured
- Workers’ compensation
- Carried on every crew member
- Irrigation licensing
- Licensed installer on every water-system job
Certificates of insurance available on request before work begins.
- 0 Years shaping Texas landscapes
- 0 Properties transformed
- 0 Square feet designed & installed
- 0 Clients who stay on for maintenance