League City

A large timber pergola over the back of the house, with the terrace beneath it laid as stone treads with turf joints, curving round into freshly mulched planting beds against a kerbed edge. A second League City job runs a diamond lattice of pavers and turf along the length of a pool deck.

The before-and-during frames are the useful ones here. Under a pergola you get dappled shade all day, which is the pattern natural grass copes with worst — it goes patchy in bands that follow the rafters. What replaces it is only as good as what is underneath: the ground is stripped, geotextile and aggregate go down, and the base is screeded and compacted to a rail before a single roll of turf is opened. That stage is invisible in the finished photograph and it is the one that decides whether the surface is still flat in five years.