Three generations, one studio, since 1959.

The King family started this firm in Lemont in 1959. The work then was the work now: designing outdoor spaces that would still look like themselves twenty years later. The southwest Chicago suburbs were a different shape — fewer lots, more open ground, a different idea of what a yard was for — and the original generation built a practice around the conviction that a landscape was a long commitment, not a one-season install.

[confirm with Sean — original founder name and the specific circumstance of the firm's founding (founder's trade background, what the first commissions were, whether the studio was originally at the current Jeans Road address or elsewhere in Lemont).]

Three generations later, we still design and build from the same studio at 16W280 Jeans Road. The crew has grown — fourteen people now, across landscape architecture, design, horticulture, and craft trades — but the discipline hasn't moved. We still walk every site before we draw a line. We still draw before we quote. We still build with our own crews. We still come back in spring to check the plantings we put in last fall.

What three generations of family ownership buys, in practical terms: continuity of judgment. The person who specifies a stone is the same firm that sets it, the same firm that calls when a step settles in year three, and the same firm that prunes the hedge in year fifteen. That's the founding bet, restated for every project.