What we were working with
A cabin on Lake Washington, a couple of miles west of Dassel, with a matching detached garage and big oaks and maples all around it. The buildings were in good shape. The ground was not. The bank between the cabin and the lake was slumping, the drive was a rutted track with no edge, there was no real path from where you parked to the deck, and the yard was a mix of bare dirt and whatever had seeded itself under the trees.
The owners wanted the whole thing done at once, by one crew, so nothing got torn up twice. That is the kind of job we like, because the pieces depend on each other. The wall holds the bank so the patio stays put. The grading decides where the water goes before the beds and the lawn go in. The driveway and walk set the lines that everything else follows.
What we built
We started on the lake side. A line of large natural boulders now holds the bank below the cabin, each one seated into the slope with the face leaned back into the hill and gravel packed behind. Hostas went in along the base of the wall where the shade is heaviest, and the bank above was graded smooth and seeded. A set of steps with a wood rail runs down the slope beside the wall so you can get to the water without cutting across the new grass.
Off the deck we laid an irregular flagstone patio with a fire pit at the center and room for a ring of chairs around it. The stones are fitted tight with dark joint sand so the surface reads as one piece. A couple of boulders too good to bury were set at the edge of the patio as seats and accents, and a river rock bed runs between the patio and the deck posts to catch roof runoff. Step lights were set into the deck risers and path lights along the edge of the patio so the walk from the cabin to the fire is lit after dark.
On the garage side we poured a broom-finish concrete parking pad in front of the doors and ran a curved concrete walkway from the pad to the cabin deck, the same width the whole way, pitched so it sheds water toward the beds and not toward the cabin. The drive from the road up to the pad stays gravel, which is what the owners wanted on a lake lot, but it now has a paver band along both edges that holds the gravel in place and gives the drive a clean line against the lawn.
Between the drive and the cabin we cut in planting beds edged with smaller boulders and filled them with evergreens, a few birch, and perennials that can take a Wright County winter. Dark mulch where the plants live, river rock where the downspouts and the roof edge dump water. Every square foot we disturbed, which was most of the lot, was graded, seeded, and covered with straw blanket so the slope holds through the first spring.
Why it will last
The boulder wall drains on its own. There is no mortar and no solid face for water to push on, so a wet spring moves through it instead of against it. The flagstone sits on a compacted aggregate base deep enough to ride out frost without cracking, and the concrete pad and walk sit on compacted class 5 with control joints cut where we want the slab to crack if it ever does.
The beds and the seeding are the part people overlook. Bare ground on a lake slope washes into the water the first hard rain. Mulch, rock, and straw blanket keep the soil where we left it until the roots take over.
If you have a lake place with a bank that needs holding and a yard that needs a plan, we build the whole thing: boulder walls, flagstone patios, concrete driveways and pads, and planting beds with mulch and rock, on Lake Washington and across Wright and Meeker counties. Start with a free estimate.
