Stone Walls in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Prospect Hill and Spring Hill fall under local historic-district review, and tight setbacks on drumlin clay make retaining walls and drainage the whole of the job.

Much of this work we build straight from a landscape architect’s drawing — batter, height, cap detail, and stone selection exactly as specified — in ongoing collaboration with Jonathan Keep Landscape Design. The Somerville site is left clean at the end of every day.

Stone varies wildly pallet to pallet, so we select it ourselves. In Somerville, where the local character runs to restored Second Empire and Italianate mansions on Spring Hill and Prospect Hill above the city's signature Victorian two- and three-family houses, getting the color and cleft right matters more than the grade printed on the invoice.

Somerville sits in Middlesex County, and most weeks we are somewhere in this pocket of Greater Boston — which means shorter travel, faster site visits, and a crew that already knows how ground behaves around here.

A wall in Somerville is a drainage structure before it is a stone one. A compact grid draped over seven drumlin hills that slope to the Mystic River lowland sit on clay-rich glacial till capping the drumlins over Cambridge argillite bedrock, which drains slowly and demands engineered footings — and that is where a wall lives or dies. We excavate to a compacted base below frost depth and build a weep-and-drainage channel behind every retaining wall, so the hydrostatic pressure of a New England winter never gets the leverage to push it out of plumb.

Turn a sloped Somerville lot into level, planted, usable ground and — built this way — it stays that way, quietly, for decades.

Designers keep sending us Greater Boston work for one reason: what gets built matches what was drawn. We hold the spec, raise conflicts early, and document as we go — including on the Jonathan Keep Landscape Design projects throughout this portfolio.