When a client contacted Kevin Minton of Coastal Source, asking for a contractor recommendation to install outdoor audio lighting, one name rang a bell: Joe Palimeno, owner and landscape designer at Ledden Palimeno Landscape Co. in Sewell, N.J.
“When I refer our contractors to projects, I try to match the right person to the job,” says Minton, who serves as the key accounts manager of national sales at Coastal Source, an outdoor lighting and audio provider. “There were huge challenges on the project like the tight space and working around other contractors, but Joe’s team wants to be challenged. They embrace it—it’s incredible what they do.”
The client himself spent a lot of time outside, working during the day and unwinding there at night with a glass of wine. He harbored a passion for music, which made the audio piece of the project so crucial, and had also just invested a lot of money into the property and wanted to show it off.
“This space they were working in was very long and narrow like a bowling alley, and the client had just rejoined the bricks, so it looked fresh like a brand-new building,” Minton says. “It was on a corner lot, and the client had just spent all this money, so he wanted it to be a showpiece. Other things to consider were that it’s in the middle of Philadelphia, so there’s all kinds of other ambient lights and streetlights to compete with, making the challenge even bigger.”
While Ledden Palimeno, a firm that provides 40 percent maintenance and 60 percent design-build services for a mostly residential clientele, was initially tapped to install landscape lighting and audio, after initial conversations, the company made a plan to install the irrigation as well.
“I started to ask a lot more questions,” Palimeno says. “There was no irrigation in the initial plan, so I talked to Drew (the client) about that, and we ended up developing a plan for irrigation and lighting because they had to be installed hand in hand.”
For the audio piece, Minton stepped in to do a demo and assist with what products would bring perfect harmony to the space.
One of the main challenges involved the complex nature of the project, which Palimeno combatted by keeping an open mind from the start.
“I worked with the client to find out about every part of this project instead of just looking at it as being the landscape lighting installer,” Palimeno says. “We put together a very comprehensive landscape design proposal, and Coastal helped us with the lighting schematic. All of the contractors on the site were dancing around each other, but we made it work. A lot of the challenges were handled before we even got to the site.”
Because the house was in an area that was hundreds of years old, when the company started to dig for the irrigation, it found old foundations, so it had to perform excavation work to install all the conduits and then still have enough room for the plantings.
From start to finish, Ledden Palimeno completed its portion of the project in about two weeks, with no more than three crew members on-site at a time.
“These are the kind of projects that excite us at Ledden Palimeno,” Palimeno says. “The ones where not just any contractor is going to be able to get in there and work within the tight confines, the historic nature of the site and be respectful of that. In this case, the goal was to bring more light to the building and bring attention to the architectural detail and historic nature of the house. It was a small project, but very exciting to be part of.”
