A workplace courtyard is not decoration — it is infrastructure for people. Done well, planting slows foot traffic, cools paving by several degrees and gives teams somewhere their best thinking happens.
Design for the lunch hour first
Count seats in sun and shade at 1pm, not on plan. If forty people can't comfortably eat outside, the space will stay empty no matter how beautiful the planting is. Seating, shelter and sun mapping come before species lists.
Spend water where people look
Keep irrigation and high-care planting near entrances and seating. Let the far corners go meadow — one cut a year, alive with insects, and honest about what it is. Budgets stretch twice as far this way.
Measure what matters
We track footfall, water use and maintenance hours on our commercial sites. The headline from our Austin campuses: half the water, fortnightly instead of weekly visits, and ten times more lunchtime use.
Ask your contractor for seasonal hours per square metre, not just a monthly fee. It's the only number that lets you compare grounds bids fairly.
