California Landscape & Design

Working with the California Landscape and Design team was a wonderful experience, my husband and I relied on their vast design and construction knowledge and experience to beautify our property. Jose Garcia was great to work with and his ideas are refreshing and current.
We happily recommend California Landscape and Design, they are a great company to work with.

My experience pretty much mirrors Beverly C’s experience. The first person out was a «director», don’t remember his name. He looked around; I told him our price range, 50−60K and he said he would get back to us. The bid came in at $ 134K! We’re talking a 1000sf home in a working class neighborhood folks… My style is currently selling in the 320−340K range; you don’t put 40−45% of your home value into landscape especially with today’s drought conditions.
Now the real frustration began; Jose Garcia, their design managers contacts me to make an appointment and that he knew the original estimate was higher than we were willing to spend but they would work at bringing it down. Jose shows up with to of his design associates and surveys my property, talks with us and states that he’ll get back to us with a revised design. After missing his appointment I call up and he finally comes out with a new design proposal at 116K… Once again, way more expensive than our budget. We all sit down and start whittling away at the proposal with the most expensive part being the complete rebuild twice as high of an existing retaining wall. We also went with more concrete and less pavers, changed the patio cover to Alumawood and started to get the price down to an exceptable level. Jose stated that their design work was done (two revisions) but he would rewrite the contract reflecting the most current changes and get back to us in a week. Two weeks later i call him and he says he’s still waiting to hear from his «Alumawood guy».
It been a month and I’ve heard nothing. I paid my design fee of $ 1700 and got a nice design but it still doesn’t reflect our final changes but at least it’s enough to show a contractor what I’m looking for. I was willing to proceed on with engineering and construction phases with California Landscape & design until they completely blew me off. Maybe if you want to «go big» these are your people. My only conclusion is that I whittled the job down to where it wasn’t worth their while. I even told Jose that I would understand if the job was getting «to small» for their firm. He said «no, they do big and small jobs».
Is my experience typical? I don’t know; most of experience is based on my interaction with Jose but he is one of there primary customer facing employees. So now we’re looking for a new contractor that can draw up prints for the city and complete the work.
I would not recommend this company.

I am VERY disappointed with how this company operates their business! By just looking at the pictures on their website, the company looks great. But for those of you who are looking for residential landscaping for your home, don’t bother making an appointment. It’s a waste of time. They will send their «director» to your home that handles «residential landscaping and design» and he will spend a total of 20 min, with you explaining that he doesn’t do the designing but just generally surveys what you need done, takes a few measurements, snaps some pictures and goes on his merry way, saying he will email a bid proposal soon. That would be fine if I could have discussed in detail what I wanted and maybe get some input from one of their designers… but apparently, they want you to sign the contract before ANY discussions are made! The contract only covers 2 revisions and charges extra if you need plants included in your landscape design. Wow. They obviously know how to make a profit. Never heard of signing a contract and not actually talking to the design architect that would be assigned to the job. That’s just a poor business model in my opinion.