The corridor, read from above.
Annotated orthomosaic · Texas Hill Country
§Work · Plate IV
A naturalized drainage corridor — a hydraulic spine — that captures surface runoff and escorts it away from a pool and the surrounding infrastructure through positive grading, before the water can get any ideas. Built with native limestone, engineered landforms, and ecological planting, it manages stormwater, minimizes erosion, and reads like a Texas Hill Country creek that has simply always been there.
The corridor, read from above.
Annotated orthomosaic · Texas Hill Country
The read
A pool and the ground around it shed water fast, and fast water is an erosion problem looking for somewhere to happen. The work was to slow it, route it, and — the part most people skip — make the routing beautiful: to promote a drainage problem into the spine the whole landscape organizes itself around.
Instead of a buried pipe sulking underground, the corridor carries water the way the Hill Country has always carried it: across limestone, through grade, into planting hardy enough to survive a flood and a drought in the same season without filing a complaint.
How it's composed
Hydraulic spine
Marshals surface runoff while speaking, fluently, the visual language of a Texas Hill Country creek.
Native succession zone
Plant communities chosen to grow up into a self-reinforcing ecosystem that needs us less every year.
Human-experience layer
Views, movement, and sound composed to invite exploration — and, when the day calls for it, the rarer luxury of standing still.
Materials & detail
The lesson
Route the water as the centerpiece and the property's worst liability turns into its most alive feature — the same stubborn logic that scales, untroubled, from a backyard corridor to an entire watershed.