Our Design Offerings
Catherine and Neville Dunton-McLeod are happy to do design facilitation work for properties between Waihi Beach and Rotorua, including the areas around Tauranga, Omokoroa, Papamoa and Katikati. If you live outside this area, contact us and we will refer you to another quality permaculture designer.
A permaculture design can save you time, money and resources. The design process is as much about you and your lifestyle as it is about the land. We work with your values, wish list, skills, time, taste and budget. We then consider the property itself – soil type, weather exposure, slopes, plants, water and buildings. Our aim is to produce aesthetic and functional designs which include all the possible items off your wish list, well located within the microclimates and landscape of your property.
Many couples and families contact us because they have different visions of where things will go, or the chosen aesthetic of the place. Most people find that “stuck spots” smooth out or are accommodated as we dive into the process together.
Concept Design Consultancy:
Here’s how working with us usually goes:
- You contact us and we have a preliminary free 30 minute Zoom chat.
- If we both feel its a “go”, you pay the fee or deposit, and upon receipt, we send you some homework over email: requests for photos, wish lists, etc., so that we can get to know you.
- Once we’ve received all your homework, we’ll arrange a Zoom meeting to talk about your homework responses and form a guiding statement which will steer any future choices. We’ll end this chat by scheduling a property visit.
- When we arrive at your property, after a brief hello, we then do a sort of “zen walk” without you, observing and assessing the characteristics of the site (e.g. sun, wind, slope, existing vegetation, water flows). During this walk, clipboard, camera, and maps in hand, we start to come up with a rough pencil “concept” sketch.
- Before we depart, we’ll have a sit down and share our preliminary concept design and inviting your feedback. This is good time for you to update us on any additional elements you would like included in the design.
- Back at our office, we then jump in creating drawings that lay out our basic concept design plus a report summarising our site analysis, design recommendations, possible next steps, helpful people in the area to contact, and books and newsletters to read. This is emailed to you. With this concept design in hand, we encourage you to “draw on your site”, using old hoses or stakes to mark out new outside divisions or “rooms”, and see how it all feels. Within a couple of weeks, we like to have a 30-60 minute Zoom conversation to hear your responses, make any tweaks to the design and answer any questions.
Our fee for this consultancy is $750 inc. GST, a $375 deposit payable in advance, the balance upon completion of the property visit. Large or complex properties may require more time, more visits and a higher fee at a rate of $75 per hour. A travel fee of .70 per k is also requested.
Here is a recent podcast of a design colleague of ours, Dan Palmer, talking with another senior permaculture designer, Meg McGowan. Listening will give you a better feel for how the process might go if you decided to engage with us.
After the Concept Design:
Most people find it helpful to live with the concept design for a while, playing around with hoses, stakes and other markers on the land. What most clients then report to us is that the details of what goes exactly where then starts to be effortlessly obvious. We love a call or email to share how its all going as you implement the design.
Detailed Design Consultancy
Some clients like us to return to do a detailed design on one or more areas of the property. You might
want a detailed design of an orchard or forest garden design – getting those trees in now so you’ll have fruit as soon as possible. Or maybe you are building or renovating your home and would like our help making sure you are making the best building and energy choices from a resiliency and permaculture perspective. If your main interest is growing food, we can help facilitate an aesthetic and edible landscape design you can start immediately start to implement.
The detailed design consultancy phase usually requires another visit or two to your place. We then get back to our desks and generate an accurate, to scale base map and design, including particular kinds of plants, exact locations and generally much more detail. We deliver a 5-15 page report with as much helpful detail as we can pack in. Our fee for this consultancy an hourly rate of $75 and .70 per k travel. Large or complex properties may require more time and a higher fee.
If you have further questions, please get in touch with us by email to set up a day and time to have a phone or Zoom chat.
Using our secure online checkout below allows you to pay by either bank deposit or credit card via Paypal
Concept Design Consultancy – Full Payment | $750.00Add to cart |
Concept Design Consultancy – Deposit | $375.00Add to cart |
Concept Design Consultancy – Balance |
$375.00Add to cart |