One of the strategies of smart growth and sustainable communities is to promote infill development, Botaniko adopts and embraces this concept. Botaniko, as the name suggests, is a community where the outdoor environment & lush landscape takes center stage. The project is located at the City of Weston, Florida. It is a 123-acre (50 hectare) master planned residential development with 125 modern home sites.
Landscape Design Workshop provided the master plan for the entire community and completed the landscape architecture design for the common space as well as for the individual homes.
Site Context
Botaniko is an infill site located near the edge of the Everglades National Park, a world heritage site with an ecosystem dominated by water & wetlands. Since 1900 the everglades has been under tremendous pressure from development and according to the United States Geological Survey it lost 50 percent of the original wetlands as a result.
The development site was a part of the Bonaventure Golf Club. More then 4-decade old, this golf course was struggling with high maintenance cost and declining demand. Subsequently, the client decided to re-purpose it as a single family community.
Design Intent
The guiding idea was simple, if we want to reduce the pressure on the Everglades we have to re-evaluate current development within the urban area and redevelop existing under-utilized spaces in a resilient way.
Landscape Design Workshop recognized the importance of water, Influenced by proximity to everglades. A fundamental decision was to make water a key design feature, maximizing water views for the future residents. The design included reconfiguration of the lakes while maintaining on-site storm water storage and connectivity to existing lake system.
The design creates an indoor-outdoor continuum, connecting modern architecture with the environment using lush, native-dominated, planting. Outdoor spaces with wide-ranging scale are weaved into the design; as intimate as a pool side sitting area and summer kitchen, or as expansive as open space with walkways and trail system.
In this project Landscape Design Workshop distilled the essence of the surrounding environment and used it as a guide. What emerged from this investigation was a resilient community featuring the importance of water and strong relationship between modern architecture and open space.
Botaniko
Landscape Architecture & Planning: Landscape Design Workshop
Client: Terra Group
Photography: Landscape Design Workshop & Avatar Productions
