The Ultimate Guide for Landscaping Your Office Building

Most Americans spend a large portion of their time at work. Even if you love your job, you likely suffer from the boredom of the routine or the dread of leaving your cozy bed some mornings. You need something other than a triple-shot espresso to help disperse those feelings and inspire you for the day.

We’ve got news for you, friends. Office building landscapes don’t have to be boring (even if you happen to work in a boring industry). In fact, they can be the complete opposite of boring—they can make your walk into work and office view bring you a bit of joy.

Don’t you think it’s about time you spruce up your office building landscape and lawn areas?

If you’re tired of looking at the same, uninspiring landscape on your everyday walk into the office, we’ve got good news – there’s a remedy. Jazzing up your office space’s landscape is a breeze – if you know what you’re doing.

Luckily, you’re in good hands. The Landcrafters Team has been spicing up office building landscapes for years, and we’ve put together a helpful, happy guide that should aid you in creating a beautiful landscape for your commercial property.

So, what do you say? Do you want to make your employees proud to work in an office that values landscape aesthetics? Do you want to provide your guests with a feast for their senses when they gaze upon your landscape? Do you want to feel an overwhelming sense of peace and tranquility as you bask in the natural outdoor beauty during your lunch break?

We thought you might.

Check out our ultimate guide for office building landscaping tricks below to get a jump start on kicking your campus lawn into gear!

Make the Right First Impression

For decades, the quality of your handshake was the best first impression you could make. While a firm grasp and perfectly brisk shake may still earn the respect of your latest client, we believe there’s a way to make a positive first impression before you ever clasp palms.

That’s why we encourage you to consider your office’s main entrance as your handshake to the world. You want your front entrance to be welcoming, warm, and interesting. The right landscaping is precisely how you accomplish these goals.

You want it to simultaneously catch peoples’ eye, provide the perfect accent to your building, and most importantly, not demand too much upkeep. Just like gauging the right amount of pressure to assert in a handshake, this can be a hard balance to achieve.

That’s where we come in! We suggest keeping things simple but effective, like adding bright, vibrant flowering plant beds near your office entrance in order to attract attention.

Of course, not just any foliage will do. You’ll want to choose colors that will complement your building, not clash, and also consider plants that are manageable and will grow well in our Florida heat.

Think about how colors like blues, greens, and purples are said to recede, or rather, make the area around them appear larger. Meanwhile, warmer colors like red, yellow, and orange are known to advance your space, rather, make your area look a bit smaller and more compact.

Certain perennial plants, like Blue Daze Lantana, Vinca, and Cat’s Whiskers, are a great place to start. You can also include things like small shrubs, too, like Firebush, Juniper, Drift Rose, and Ixora, to help bring about texture and impact to your entrance.

Entryways are a big deal, and you don’t need an enormous budget to create a front entry landscape (for your commercial or residential space) that’s going to blow your customers’ minds. Sometimes, confidence and simplicity are all it takes to make a favorable impression. Think about that the next time you reach out for a handshake or plan out the entryway to your building.

Not sure where to start? We’ve got you. Check out our comprehensive post here about how to create a front entry landscape that will blow your mind, not your budget.

An Anything but Common Area

If you’re looking to redesign your office landscape to give your campus a better look and feel, we can’t avoid suggesting that you provide your employees and guests with an outdoor common area and a comfortable seating area or patio.

It’s important to provide comfortable, ample seating – we’re talking picnic tables, stone benches, and maybe even fire pits or water features for people to gather around. You’re going to put a lot of work into your landscape redesign and you’ll want people to not only want to look at it but also take the time to sit outside and enjoy it.

Make sure you’ve planted enough big, leafy plants and trees to help provide shade for these common areas, and if you’re looking to encourage a secluded private feel, we suggest implementing tall hedges or shrubs to help separate these areas a bit from the rest of the campus.

There’s a ton more to consider when adding a common area. In fact, there’s so much more, we wrote a whole extra article about it! Check it out here to get even more tips and tricks about how to craft the perfect common area for your office building.

As a last note, we suggest adding outdoor wi-fi to encourage people to sit outside! Your employees and guests will appreciate your dedication to creating an environment that is perfect for taking a brief break from the routine to enjoy your lunch and soak up the natural beauty Florida has to offer.

Your Signage is Important – Treat it That Way!

Often, office buildings will spend time and money on redesigning their landscape and entirely forget about their signage. If your entrance is your handshake, your signage is the wave that invites people over to shake your hand – in other words, your office building needs to make a great impression from a distance, too.

We suggest adding bright pops of color around your signage to draw in eyes and grab attention. That being said, you don’t want to add in colors that clash with your sign’s color scheme, so be aware of what works and what doesn’t. It’s also important to recognize seasonal changes. Though we’re in Florida and don’t see a lot of seasonal change, it can be fun to change up your colors and textures of the plants and blooms around your signage to switch it up.

Consider crepe myrtle and palm fronds in the summer, light, bright daffodils or tulips in the spring, deep colors like red maple and bougainvillea in the winter, and coleus and caladiums in autumn.

One of the most important aspects of your signage landscaping is the amount of upkeep it will take. You never want your plants or blooms to block your signage, so you’ll have to schedule regular maintenance for this fauna to ensure they don’t overshadow the signage itself!

As you’ve probably noticed, signage is a complicated process and requires a lot of attention to detail. Luckily, we’re professionals at Landcrafters and have had years of experience dotting the Is and crossing the Ts on what makes the perfect signage. We’ve even written a blog post about it! Check it out here for more information!

Strike a Balance Between Interest and Safety

Planning out beautiful patios, garden areas, water features, or common areas for your office building campus can be fun and exciting. Trust us, as landscaping professionals, we understand how invigorating it is to not only strategize but put into action the beautiful plans you have for your space. That being said, you need to always consider safety measures for your office building campus when you’re redesigning your landscape.

For starters, always consider the types of plants, shrubs, trees, and flowers you’ll be adding to your campus. You never want to add fauna that’s too hard to keep up with because you want to prevent an overgrown jungle at all costs. If shrubs are left to grow too tall, they can obstruct vision, and if trees are left to wildly grow, their roots and branches could rip up sidewalks and parts of your building.

Additionally, if you haven’t considered things like drainage for your newly-designed landscape, you could be left in ankle-deep, stagnant water in your beautiful, new yard – especially when you consider how wild the rain can get in Florida. Excess water like that can lead to dangerous bacteria, mold, fungus, and gross odors. All of that adds up to a dangerous, costly, and unpleasant working environment.

There are always dozens of safety concerns to consider when you’re implementing new landscaping for your office building. These considerations are even more important than the plant life you choose to accent your building, as they directly affect the health of those plants, the integrity of your building, and more. For more information on these safety concerns, check this out!

Go Green and Stay Sustainable

Not sure how else to boost your office space? Try embracing a trend that’s good for you, good for your customers, good for your staff, and best of all, good for the environment. That’s right, implementing sustainable practices and going green can make a huge difference in your office space!

Whether you’re tackling your office space landscaping yourself or you’ve hired a reputable, quality landscaping team (hint, hint, we’re available!),  there are plenty of sustainable options you can include in your office landscape—from your practices to your features.

For example, you can re-vamp your grass cutting methods by recycling your green clipping and using them as compost, you can opt-out of mowers with gas-powered engines, and you can ease up on your irrigation (or spring for a smart irrigation system).

Alternatively, you can add in thoughtful, green spaces like community gardens, green spaces, and trails. Check out this article here with plenty of sustainable, green ideas that can give your office space an eco-makeover.

We hope that we provided you with plenty of helpful information for crafting the perfect landscape for your commercial office building. If not, you better believe we have about three thousand more ideas up our sleeve—just kidding, we’ve got a lot more than that. No matter what your plans are for your office space, commercial building, or multi-tenant space, we’ve got you covered!

If you like our style and are interested in improving your landscaping, we’d love to provide you with even more information, our expert insights, and our Florida-specific landscaping guides! We encourage you to check out our site, give us a call at 727-497-7831, or otherwise get in contact with us to chat about your unique landscaping needs! We look forward to hearing from you!