A designer and a stonemason, in one company

Before Pecan Hollow, Marisol Ortega was a landscape designer and Wade Kessler ran a small masonry crew out of Fredericksburg. They worked on the same jobs for years, and saw the same problems on every one. A plan would call for a patio that didn't account for the slope. A wall would go in without the drain the drawing assumed. Plants would arrive after the irrigation was already buried in the wrong place. Each company did its own part well, and the yard still came out wrong.

So in 2013 they rented a yard on Gruene Road in New Braunfels and started one company. The rule from day one was simple: the designer walks the site with the crew on the first day of the build, and one project lead stays with the job until the final walkthrough. More than 700 projects later, that's still how every job runs.

We're deliberately regional. Our crews work within about an hour of New Braunfels, because knowing the ground is most of the job. Caliche in Boerne, blackland clay in Seguin and septic fields on the slopes at Canyon Lake each need different answers, and we'd rather know them well than work everywhere.