Twenty years of designing and building in DFW.

Alterra began as a design-build practice out of Richardson and has held that position without drift for more than two decades of DFW landscape-design practice. The opening register was what the practice still runs on: one Principal reading the ground, authoring the drawing, and owning the build through handoff. No designer-to-contractor baton-pass in the middle. No ongoing maintenance program layered on afterward. The arc of the work has been a long one — the practice has been building in DFW since well before “design-build” became a marketing phrase — but the structural commitment has not moved.

The early projects were residential and local, sited mostly in Richardson and the neighborhoods immediately adjacent, scaled to what one Principal could author and build end-to-end. As the client list widened across the metro the practice followed the work rather than the other way around: Dallas first, then the Park Cities, then the Preston Hollow and Highland Park flagship register, then the northern city hubs of Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, and Lucas. Richardson stayed the base. What changed across those years was the geographic range; what stayed constant was the relationship between Principal, drawing, and site.

Two shifts over the last decade mattered more than the others. The first was recognition: the Texas Nursery & Landscape Association began awarding Alterra a Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award every year from 2019 onward, recognition that is peer-juried rather than platform-voted, and is the closest thing the region has to a profession-internal quality read. The second was capacity: Hayden Davenport and Tyler Bigham joined as Principals, and what had been a single-Principal practice became a three-Principal practice — without flattening into a department structure. The place-narrative frame, which had been present implicitly from the beginning, became a named design discipline across all three Principals' work.

Alongside the additions, the practice has been deliberate about what it does not do. Alterra does not offer ongoing maintenance, does not run stewardship programs, and does not take projects that need a weekly lawn crew or a long-term service-contract relationship. Every project has a definable handoff; the Principal who took the first call is the Principal who walks the site at completion. That discipline has clarified what the practice actually builds toward — residential design-build at a register where one Principal can hold the whole arc in their head — and has kept the register from drifting into trades-tier or do-everything territory where the model breaks.

In February 2021 Winter Storm Uri held DFW under freezing air for five consecutive days, drove soil temperatures below anything in the region's recorded horticultural memory, and killed material that had been specified across the metro for decades. The event did not ask serious regional practices to be sympathetic; it asked them to be accurate. What failed — the borderline zone 9a specimens sold as zone 8, the unprotected irrigation manifolds, the mortar joints that had passed every previous winter — failed in full view. What survived carried a different kind of evidence. The week rewrote, in the field, which species belong in a DFW specification and which had been carried by lucky winters.

The practice read that week as data, not as an anomaly. The plant palette contracted toward species with a documented record through the freeze; the irrigation-manifold placement discipline tightened around freeze-event protection detailed at design rather than retrofitted later; mortar chemistry and hardscape jointing were revised to anticipate freeze-thaw rather than survive it on margin. Resilience became a line item designed into every project at the Site & Story and Design phases, not an after-the-fact warranty conversation. Read the Resilience section for the specific post-Uri discipline as it now runs through the Build phase of every project.

Alterra runs today as a three-Principal practice: Jeffery Riddle, Hayden Davenport, and Tyler Bigham. Each Principal owns a client relationship end-to-end, from the first conversation through the final walk, with no designer-to-contractor handoff in the middle. Technical depth shares across the three — the post-Uri plant specification, the material-supplier relationships, the DFW-ecoregion performance record — while the single-Principal-per-client discipline holds. Named collaborators sit on record at the project level (architects, interior designers, pool-builder partnerships where Alterra is the landscape partner), credited with written permission rather than absorbed into a generic under-one-roof claim.

The service area as it stands is three flagship neighborhoods — Highland Park, University Park, Preston Hollow — anchoring seven city hubs that cover the metro from Richardson north through Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, and Lucas and south into Dallas. The register has not changed across the arc of the practice: place-anchored, specific to the ground the drawing sits on, without self-applied superlatives or maintenance programs, and without taking projects that would pull the practice out of the one-Principal-per-client shape. What is visible on a finished Alterra garden is what the practice has been building toward for the full twenty-year run.