ABOUT · HISTORY
Twenty years.
A short editorial treatment of the Alterra practice since founding. Not a timeline chart; a narrative of the inflection points that shaped how we design and build today.
Founding — more than two decades ago.
Alterra opened as a design-build practice from the start. It did not grow out of a separate design studio that later added construction, and it did not grow out of a trades operation that later added design; those two points of origin produce different shapes of practice, and the one Alterra has always run on — one Principal authoring the drawing and staying on it through handoff — is the design-build posture held from the first project forward. The base was Richardson. The work was local. The register Jeffery Riddle opened the practice with — specific, place-grounded, no self-applied superlatives, the client relationship owned by one Principal end-to-end — is recognizably the register the practice still runs on more than two decades later.
Early projects concentrated in Richardson and the close-in Dallas neighborhoods immediately adjacent, sized to what a single Principal could read, draw, and build without the handoffs the larger-firm model routinely accepts. The client base was residential; the price-tier register that would later settle on Preston Hollow, Highland Park, and University Park was present in the DNA from the beginning but widened in scope over the first decade as the work followed referrals outward across the metro. What was there at the opening and is there now: the unbroken Principal-to-client relationship, the Richardson base, and a commitment to reading the ground that the drawing would sit on before drawing anything.
Recognition, 2019 onward.
Beginning in 2019 and continuing through 2025, the Texas Nursery & Landscape Association has awarded Alterra a Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award every year. The recognition matters in specific ways. It is peer-juried rather than platform-voted: the jury is composed of working landscape practitioners evaluating submitted residential work against named criteria, not a customer-review algorithm or a paid promotion tier. It recognizes the building and the garden itself, not the marketing around it. And it is the regional industry's closest-to-internal quality signal, which is why the seven-consecutive-year run reads as a line rather than a series of isolated years. See the full awards record.
In early 2026 the practice also received a Best of Houzz 2026 designation. The Houzz recognition operates on a different axis — it is client-review-driven rather than peer-juried — and serves as a distinct signal about the client-facing side of the work rather than a second version of the TNLA read. The practice does not describe itself as “award-winning” in the abstract; the awards that are surfaced anywhere on the site are named — Texas Excellence in Landscaping, Best of Houzz — and carry year ranges. The point of listing them is transparency about the record, not claim-amplification.
POST-URI · DESIGN-DISCIPLINE SHIFT
The 2021 inflection.
In February 2021 Winter Storm Uri held DFW under freezing air for five consecutive days and produced soil temperatures lower than anything in the region's recorded horticultural memory. The event read, on the practice's own prior specifications, as an accuracy audit. Queen palms and tender Pittosporum cultivars that had been carried through a decade of mild winters failed outright. Certain Podocarpusspecimens split. Borderline zone 9a material that the catalog had optimistically sold as zone 8 collapsed. Irrigation manifolds in placements that had passed every previous winter shattered. Mortar joints on terraces that had never flinched cracked. The practice's internal read was straightforward: on most of what failed, the freeze was not an anomaly that should be written off — it was a data point that should change the work.
From that week forward the specification tightened. The working palette contracted toward species with a documented record on the other side of the freeze: the live oaks that held through Uri with measurable damage but demonstrable recovery, eastern red cedar as the reliable DFW-native evergreen structure, the native grasses and forbs that went dormant and returned in spring. Irrigation manifold placement discipline was revised to anticipate freeze-event protection at the design stage rather than retrofit it after a failure. Mortar chemistry and hardscape jointing were re-detailed to handle freeze-thaw cycles the earlier details had not been built for. The shift was not a pivot or a rebrand; it was evidence read and discipline updated. Read the Resilience section for the current post-Uri specification as it runs through every Build phase.
Three Principals.
For most of its run the practice was a single-Principal practice: Jeffery Riddle reading the ground, authoring the drawing, and owning the build. The move to a three-Principal structure — Hayden Davenport and Tyler Bigham joining at Principal level — was a deliberate widening of the practice rather than a conventional hiring ramp. It preserves the single-Principal-per-client discipline that has always been the practice's structural commitment: each Principal owns a client relationship end-to-end rather than operating as a department handling a segment of the project lifecycle. The transition was structured so that capacity grew without the delivery model changing shape.
What the three-Principal structure has added is range without dilution. The practice can now carry more flagship-register work simultaneously than a single-Principal shop could sustain, because the constraint is one Principal's bandwidth across a calendar year and there are three of those bandwidths instead of one. The register does not drift, because the single-Principal-per-client discipline is load-bearing across all three. Clients still walk in expecting to work with one person from first conversation to finished garden; they still get that. The difference is that “one person” is now one of three rather than necessarily Jeffery, and the fit match-up happens in the First Conversation phase rather than by default.
Where we work today.
The flagship focus sits in three Dallas neighborhoods: Highland Park, University Park, and Preston Hollow. The scale of lot, the architectural vernacular, and the register of what clients in these neighborhoods expect from a residential landscape combine into the conditions the practice has been working toward for most of its run — a garden that matches a house of consequence without over-reaching the site, that holds its register without pretending to be a public garden, and that sits legibly within the DFW ecoregion rather than against it. The flagship work shapes how the practice sees the rest of the service area; what gets resolved on a Preston Hollow drawing becomes part of what the practice knows how to do anywhere.
Beyond the flagship neighborhoods, the practice anchors seven city hubs: Richardson, Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, Lucas, and Dallas. Each city carries its own specifics — Blackland clay or Cross Timbers sandy loam depending on the corridor, USDA zone 8a or 8b depending on the microclimate exposure, distinct permitting environments, varying HOA landscape ordinances — and the design response adjusts to the ground the project sits on rather than to a standardized template. The Richardson base is the geographic center; the shape of the practice is still one Principal per client, site-specific, reading the ground first. See the full service area.