Design Studio Careers at Plant Studio Landscape

Maybe you have spent a year at a firm that draws beautiful plans and then hands them off to a builder who waters them down. Maybe you have watched a project leave your hands and come back unrecognizable. Maybe you have wondered what it would feel like to draw a project, walk it, build it, and then check on it the next spring. Either way, what you want is plain. A studio that owns the work from sketch to install. A team that talks to the crew because the team and the crew are the same company. A design practice where the rendering and the reality look like the same thing. That is the kind of studio we are trying to be.

Plant Studio Landscape is a design-build company. That means Josh Perkins, our Landscape Architect, sketches the plan and then watches the install crew put it in the ground. There is no handoff to an outside contractor. The design and the build are the same company, run out of the same office on the east side of Muncie. If the rendering shows a cantilevered limestone step, the limestone is going to cantilever the way it does on the page.

INTEGRITY  |  PASSION  |  EFFICIENCY

We design across the region. From Mounds State Park east toward Anderson, north into the Indianapolis suburbs along the I-69 corridor, and through the Muncie area itself. The work has range. Residential landscapes, hardscape installations, pool surrounds, planting plans, lighting plans, irrigation plans. The studio is small enough that one designer sees a project from the first sketch to the final walkthrough.

The office is a working office, not a showroom. There are plans spread across the table. There are samples of stone in a rack along the wall. There is a corner where Patty Castillo, our Office Manager, keeps the projects moving and the schedule honest. The pace varies with the season. Spring through summer the studio runs hot, sketches going out and proposals coming back. Winter slows enough that we plan, draft, and get ready for the next install year.

The work is hands-on. The renderings get printed and walked. The walk informs the next revision. Design is iterative here because the install is iterative. You will spend time at a desk, time on a property, and time talking to the crew that is about to build what you drew.

Most design firms do not see what they draw get built. The plan leaves the office and the next time anyone from the studio sees it, the install is finished, the planting has settled, and there is no chance to learn from the gap between what was on the page and what came out of the ground. That gap is where landscape design either gets sharper or gets sloppy. At Plant Studio, the designer walks the install at every stage. The next plan benefits from the last one. That is the design practice we have built, and that is the practice we hire into.