Hard Landscaping Contractors in Auckland

Hard landscaping is everything in a landscape that is built rather than planted - the paving, the concrete, the steps, the retaining, the edges, the drainage and the levels that all the planting is then arranged around. It is usually the largest single cost in a garden or a courtyard, it goes in first, and it is by far the hardest part to change afterwards.

Pavecraft is an Auckland hard landscaping contractor. We have spent over 20 years building the hard elements of residential, commercial and civil landscapes, and we have deliberately invested in the skills and machinery to take on the whole built package rather than one trade out of it. Excavation and levels, retaining, paving, concrete, steps and drainage: one contractor, one set of crews, and one company answerable for how the pieces meet each other.

What we build

• Paving - courtyards, patios, entranceways, pool surrounds and copings, terraces, footpaths and large machine laid commercial areas. See paving services.
• Concrete - driveways, paths, slabs and steps, plain, coloured or exposed aggregate. See concrete driveways.
• Natural stone and granite - schist, sandstone, granite setts and cobbles and large format stone. See granite and natural stone.
• Retaining and walls - keystone and block walls, timber walls, in situ concrete and seat walls. See retaining walls.
• Steps, terracing and levels - the part that makes a sloping site usable, and the part that is most obvious when it has been set out badly.
• Drainage - channel and surface drains, cesspit connections and subsurface drainage, so the finished surfaces stay dry. See kerbing and drainage.
• Excavation and siteworks - the dig, the cart away and the base preparation under all of it. See driveway excavation and siteworks.
• Permeable surfaces - where the stormwater design or the client wants water to soak away rather than run off. See permeable paving.

Working from a design

A good deal of our residential work comes through landscape architects and designers, and we are comfortable building to a drawing set, pricing off a schedule and working to a specified product. We are equally comfortable when there is no drawing at all. Plenty of jobs get set out on site with the owner, with string lines and a laser, deciding where the step lands and which way the water goes while standing in the place it is going to happen.

Where it really matters is the interfaces. A drawing can show a paved terrace meeting a lawn meeting a wall, and it is the contractor who has to make those three things arrive at the same height in the right order. Doing the excavation, the retaining and the surfaces ourselves is what lets us commit to that.

The order things happen in

Hard landscaping is mostly a sequencing problem. Levels and excavation first, then drainage and services, then retaining, then base course, then the surfaces, and the planting last. Get that order wrong and something already finished has to be dug up again. On a residential site that is an irritation. On a commercial one it is a programme delay, which is why main contractors tend to keep the whole hard landscaping package with one subcontractor.

We hold Sitewise Gold and Site Safe accreditation and we are used to working under a main contractor's health and safety system alongside other trades. See for main contractors.

Commercial and civil hard landscaping

Most of our work is commercial. Town centre and streetscape upgrades, business parks, apartment and townhouse developments, schools, retirement villages, healthcare sites and airport precincts. It is the same discipline at a different scale, with traffic management, staging around a live site and a specification to meet. See streetscapes and town centres, subdivisions and developers and our work.

Where we work

We are based at Triton Drive in Rosedale on the North Shore and work from Whangarei to Karaka - the North Shore, West Auckland, the central, eastern and southern suburbs, and the lifestyle country north to Warkworth and Matakana.