The consultation visit: how a pro runs the first meeting

A design consultation is not a chat. A Perth landscaper charging for a first visit has roughly ninety minutes on site and one chance to leave with everything the design will need. Whatever they fail to record becomes a phone call, a wrong assumption, or a second trip to Baldivis.

So they work to a sequence. The sequence is the skill — not the eye, not the taste. It is what stops someone walking out having talked about the pergola for an hour and forgotten to measure the side gate.

You are running this visit on your own garden, which sounds easier than it is. You stopped seeing your garden about four years ago. The method below forces you to look at it the way a stranger would.

What a professional is actually doing in those ninety minutes

Three jobs at once, deliberately kept apart.

1. Recording. Measurements, photographs, services, levels, existing planting. Facts only.
2. Listening. What the client says they want, in the client’s own words.
3. Qualifying. Is the project real, is the budget in the same postcode as the ambition, can a machine get to the back, and who actually signs.

The discipline that separates a professional from an enthusiastic amateur is refusing to diagnose on site. “It’s always dark and gross out there” gets written down in quotation marks. “They need the paperbark taken out” is a conclusion, and conclusions formed in the first ten minutes are wrong often enough to be dangerous. Record now, analyse at the desk. The enquiry call told you roughly what you were walking into; this visit is where you find out how wrong that was.

Half an hour at the desk before you set foot outside

Pros do not arrive cold. Before the visit:

• Pull your lot on Landgate’s Map Viewer Plus. Note the lot dimensions, any registered easement, and which way is north. Print the aerial at A3 — that printout is your mark-up sheet for the whole walk.
• Check whether the block is bush fire prone. It takes two minutes and it changes what you are allowed to build. Detail in bushfire and dieback.
• Look up your council’s R-code and any relevant local law. That is R-codes and your council.

North matters more here than most places. A Perth block’s west boundary is the one that decides whether the garden is usable from November to March.

The walk-through sequence

Do not wander. Follow the same order every time, on every property, so that missing something becomes obvious.

1. Kerb and verge. Stand on the opposite footpath first. Note the crossover width, street trees, verge condition, bin storage, and whether a truck can stand there for a day without blocking anyone.

2. The access route. Walk from the street to the back and measure the narrowest clear point — usually the side gate, sometimes the aircon condenser bolted to the wall opposite the meter box. This single number sets your build method and a large slice of your budget.

Narrowest clear width	Roughly what gets through
Under 700 mm	Wheelbarrow and hand tools. Every tonne of sand is carried.
700–900 mm	Small tracked machines with tracks retracted, at a squeeze
900–1200 mm	Mini excavator (1–1.7 t) and Dingo/Kanga-class mini loaders
Over 1500 mm	Skid steer, and bulk deliveries stop being a labour problem

Ring the hire yard with your actual number before you plan around it — the figure that matters is the machine’s width with the tracks retracted, and it varies by model. Note overhead clearance too (eaves, patio beams, powerlines), and whether a gate post or fence panel could come out for a week.

3. The perimeter, clockwise. Every boundary, one at a time. Fence type, height, condition, who owns it, any retaining, and what the neighbour has growing over it. Under the Dividing Fences Act 1961 (WA) the cost of a sufficient dividing fence is shared equally between the two owners, with the standard set by your local government’s local law — so “whose fence is it” is a real question with a real answer. See dividing fences.

4. Inside-out. Stand at every door and window that looks into the garden and photograph the view. Gardens are looked at from the kitchen sink far more than they are stood in. Record overlooking in both directions — what the two-storey behind you sees of your courtyard, and what you see of them.

5. The middle. Levels and falls, existing paving, lawn condition, beds, trees, structures. Where does water go in a June downpour, and where are the soakwells?

6. Services and water. Taps, reticulation controller, solenoid boxes, downpipes, meter box, gas, hot water unit, aircon, sewer inspection opening, bore and pump. Visible only — buried services are locating services, and you do not dig today.

7. Sit down and talk. Last, not first. You now know enough to ask better questions.

What gets photographed

The rule is systematic, not artistic. A professional leaves with 80 to 150 photos and expects to use twenty. Storage is free; a second trip to Yanchep is not.

• Every boundary, shot from both ends.
• Every level change, with a tape or a one-metre stick in frame for scale.
• Every downpipe, and where its water ends up.
• The meter box, and the reticulation controller with its door open so the station labels read.
• The side access with a tape stretched across the narrowest point, the number legible.
• The view out of each door and window.
• A slow video walk-through with spoken commentary, as insurance against what you forgot.

Shoot one set between about 3 and 4 pm in summer if you can. That is when Perth’s western sun exposure shows itself, and it is invisible at 10 am.

What gets measured — and what does not

The consultation visit is not the survey. Measure only the five numbers that change what you would propose: overall length and width of the working area; narrowest access width and overhead clearance; eaves or patio overhang from the wall; total rise from the highest point to the lowest; and house wall to boundary in the area you actually care about.

Everything else waits for measuring up and levels, falls and datum in Phase 3, done properly with a tape, a laser and a datum peg.

The questions a Perth pro asks

Beyond the universal ones — who lives here, kids and their ages, dogs, what you do out there now and what stops you, what is staying no matter what, how much maintenance you will genuinely do — there is a WA-specific list:

• Is there a bore? Working? Any iron staining on the fence or paving?
• Which watering days are you rostered on, how many reticulation stations are there, and which of them are dead?
• Did anyone hit limestone or coffee rock when the pool, patio or soakwells went in?
• Where does water sit after a heavy winter downpour?
• Which fence is yours?
• Which months do you actually want to be outside? In Perth the honest answer is usually September to November and March to May, which changes where shade matters.

Bores, the sprinkler roster and the winter sprinkler ban are covered properly in bores, roster and the winter ban, and the western-sun problem in designing for a Perth summer.

Doing this to your own garden

Being your own client is the hard version, and being your own client explains why. Three countermeasures that work:

1. Carry the printed aerial and a pen, not your phone. Phones turn a survey into scrolling.
2. Say your answers out loud and write them verbatim before analysing a single one. Then close the notebook for a day.
3. Walk it with someone who has never been there and let them talk first. What they notice in ninety seconds is what a designer would have noticed.

Next, the money conversation takes the access width, the level change and the element list you just recorded and turns them into a realistic Perth budget band — which decides how much of this garden you can afford to touch at once.