One of the largest producers of construction aggregates in the United States, Luck Stone hired Nelson Byrd Woltz in 2006 as part of a design team charged with developing a new constructed display environment for the sale of their products.
Luck Stone Corporation envisioned six stone design centers in three states. For each center, the landscape design reveals qualities of the site through the plant palette, stone selection, or interaction with the surrounding context. The design team developed a master plan for each site that incorporated stone delivery and storage areas, a retail showroom, contractor sales building, stone slab display, aggregate bins, and access for 18-wheel truck loading—all coordinated into a site plan that met Luck Stone’s standards for safety and efficiency.
Each Design Center incorporates on-site stormwater management, filtering run-off drainage from parking lots with remediating plants that cleanse toxins from the water and recharge groundwater reserves. Trees establish the framework of the site, while shading visitors and capturing dust from turning trucks. An illuminated steel-frame gabion beacon greets visitors to the Stone Center and directs them to a datum wall constructed of massive blocks of rough-quarried sandstone.
The Design Center gardens serve as an opportunity to demonstrate a high level of craft in stone detailing while creating a series of sculpture garden-like garden courts. Each garden features a massive monolithic stone tower, a seat wall, a stone bench, and a sample paving to showcase the variety of stone available, while each seat wall screens different hedges of native shrubs that are intended to inform customers of low maintenance plants for the home landscape.
