Description
A Walk & Talk is a quick and low cost way to gain valuable perspective on designing your home and landscape for more function, beauty, and resilience.
A Walk & Talk is what it sounds like – the 7th Generation Design team comes to your property, and together we ‘walk and talk’ through your highest priority areas and design challenges. You get to bounce any and all questions you have off of us. We’ll provide you with our best ‘on the spot’ recommendations based on our years of experience. We’ll also provide you with a summarized write-up of our notes, along with any additional relevant resources worthy of further investigation.
Who is a Walk & Talk for?
Property owners and land stewards looking for a concentrated dose of regenerative design insight and ideas to aid their own visioning and development of their property.
If you know you don’t know what you don’t know, a Walk & Talk is a way to expand your horizons for what is possible with what you have, to see the old and familiar from an integrated, functional perspective, and to navigate the many questions that can arise when undertaking regenerative systems design.
Whether you’re feeling “stuck” in your vision, or have so many ideas that you don’t know where to begin, we will help to inspire, illuminate, clarify, and prioritize the what, why, how and when of it all to help you successfully integrate the pieces of your larger vision into a cohesive whole.
What is included in a Walk & Talk?
- We’ll ask you to fill out our Level 1 – Site Assessment Questionnaire in advance of the Walk & Talk date. This is the same questionnaire we have our Level 1 – Site Assessment clients fill out – it will give us the basic background information on the property and what you are looking to create with it.
- One hour of preparation time for the designer(s) – we will familiarize ourselves as best we can from satellite imagery and any photos you send us, develop our own list of questions and come ready with suggestions that seem a good fit.
- One or both members of the 7th Generation Design team at your property for up to three hours, walking and talking with you! The more questions you have the better.
- Written summary of our notes from the Walk & Talk, including relevant links to additional information on topics of interest, design element recommendations and best next steps.
What kinds of things can we focus on during the Walk And Talk?
- Site Context – climate and site-specific factors that guide decision-making.
- Water – passive water harvesting earthworks, erosion control structures and area treatments, roof and land catchments, retention systems, greywater, blackwater, laundry-to-landscape, acoustic and aesthetic water in your landscape, ponds and more!
- Access – retrofitting and patterning of roads, paths, trails, entrances and exits for maximum energy efficiency, minimal maintenance, and maximum function, including context-specific modes of construction and materials.
- Structures – retrofitting existing and planning new shelters and structures that maximize energy efficiency, function and beauty while minimizing maintenance cost.
- Living Systems – food (perennials and annuals), shade, privacy/view screens, windbreaks, fertility plantings, living mulches, water gardens, livestock integration, nutrient cycling systems and so much more!
- Boundaries – Physical boundaries (fences, walls, hedges, fedges etc) and energetic boundaries (transitions between spaces).
- Energy – solar thermal and PV potential, passive heating and cooling, lighting, appliances, money-saving use patterns, appropriate wood-burning tech and more!
- Economy – your property’s “unfair advantages” and synergies between them and your skills, passions and vision.
- Element arrangement – nesting systems within and on top of one another, stacking functions, maximizing utilization of space and maximizing yield with mutually beneficial relationships and more!
- Aerial photos of the property using our drone!
- And whatever else is on your heart and mind!