The Detailed Edge displays landscaping options indoors, so customers can plan their backyard oasis in any season. (MIKE HENSEN, The London Free Press)
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“Step right into the shop, folks. Welcome to the great outdoors.”
When Mike Wilkins set up a combined office, design centre and showroom for his Detailed Edge landscaping business a couple years ago, he had in mind a place where Old Man Winter couldn’t intrude and enforce his usual five-month shutdown in the landscape business.
Wilkins and his chief designer/horticulturist Denise Hodgins, are both energetic types, full of pep and bubbling with new ideas.
The way they see it, there’s no room for Old Man Winter to hold up the show when the world is full of potential customers eager to turn their backyard into their own idea of a little bit of heaven.
So Wilkins decided to bring the outside inside. He has created an entire palette of exterior experiences inside a space of about 20 metres by six metres and still kept a corner for design and office space (which also doubles as a deck display).
“It was my idea,” he says, but like many other good ideas, it’s so obviously good it’s bound to occur to others.
“The only other ones we’re aware of are in Burlington,” Wilkins says.
“But as far as we know, there’s nothing else like it in London,” Hodgins says.
Whatever, it has been an instant success, both commercially and as a hothouse for creative ideas.
“We’ve got 10 different types of stone here,” Wilkins says, leading a brief but busy tour of the Detailed Edge’s showcase space in Unit 108, a sprawling light-industry/commercial complex at 4023 Meadowbrook Dr. Detailed Edge is in one of the first units just off busy Exeter Rd.
In a few steps, a visitor experiences a whole range of deck and flooring materials (including synthetic grass), stone walls, fountains and sample barbecue/cooking centre installation.
“We partner in the showroom with Hickory Dickory Decks” (a London deck design and installation business), Wilkins says.
The close relationship with suppliers sparks even more creative interplay, Hodgins says.
There are pots of various materials for mulches and flower beds and many potted plants. Detailed Edge also has a potted plant and tree rental business. One of its larger installations is in the arrivals lounge at London International Airport.
Hodgins says the importance of allowing customers to experience different materials in a tactile sense can’t be exaggerated.
“I’ve seen customers in stoneyards actually licking the stone,” she says, before they decide on the type of stone they want for an outdoor food-prep and cooking centre.
There are several major influences at work in landscaping in 2012.
First there’s the ever-escalating cost of fuel that has driven up the cost of travelling vacations. People now are putting vacation dollars their own backyards, Wilkins says.
Second, an aging population is showing a distinct preference for ease of maintenance. For example, improved synthetic grass has attained acceptance and now preference in private- and multiple-residence installations.
“People who have a small backyard dominated by a large swimming pool don’t want to bother mowing or maintaining a few scraps of grass in high-traffic areas. For dog owners, the synthetic grass provides a place for the dogs to do their business and it can be washed, doesn’t stain and doesn’t smell,” Wilkins says.
The rubber-and-plastic turf, guaranteed for 25 years “is the same turf that’s in the stadium at the University of Western Ontario,” he says.
It looks and feels so natural it has become a favourite for common areas in condos.
“Residents would rather have the illusion of a lawn than bare concrete,” Hodgins says.
Despite the desire for low-maintenance yards that allow vacation-like relaxation, people still feel a need to be involved in the process at a hands-on level.
“The do-it-yourself fans are a big part of this business. We can do the designs for them,” Hodgins says.
from page H7 “About 50 to 60% of the people who get us to do designs are going to do the work themselves,” Wilkins says.
“We encourage people. Maybe we are going to do the patio, but the woman (customer) is going to do the plants; it fulfils a need,” Hodgins says.
The secret weapon in this new Stone Age is, of course, the computer.
“Customers can come in with a vague idea and in three steps see some new material they’ve never heard of before and change their minds immediately,” Wilkins says.
There are so many new materials and ideas floating around that the idea “of leaning over the hood of a truck in the client’s driveway to explain what things are going to look like” has gone the way of the buggy whip, Hodgins says.
“We can take a photo of the way their yard looks now and use our computer programs to show what a new design looks like, present it from several angles, and if they (clients) change their minds on something, we can give them a revised cost estimate in a minute,” Wilkins says.
The indoor showroom concept “has been a huge success,” Wilkins says, pointing to a sheaf of work orders pinned to his bulletin board. “We’re already booking jobs for June and July.”
He stresses that part of the Detailed Edge philosophy is “giving something back to the community.” In this case, it’s in the form of advice, suggestions and tips for customers.
“We also run seminars, coaching people on how to look after their plants,” he says.
Hodgins spends vacations looking at new ideas in landscaping and design wherever she goes.
“I travel to see new work and I work so I can travel. I’m pretty dangerous when I get back; there’s nothing we won’t try once,” she says.
Pat Currie is a London writer.
Background
Mike Wilkins’ family is Canadian but he grew up in the United States, returning to Canada in 2001 where he attended business school in Toronto. “That’s where I started out in maintenance and got a taste for landscaping,” he says.
He came to London in 2005 “because my wife Sabrina is from here” and really put down roots – in more ways than one – when he launched the Detailed Edge two years ago.
Denise Hodgins’s background is landscape design studies at Fanshawe College in London and a diploma in horticulture from the University of Guelph.
The Growing Concerns columnist for The Free Press Home section, she has worked “in all aspects of landscape from cutting grass and weeding flower beds to designing historical gardens in a museum. I have worked in both wholesale and retail sales and even greenhouse production.
“I see people looking at their yards as extensions of their homes. People are a lot more concerned for the environment and want to take better care of it.”
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