Durable and Elegant Retaining Walls for Your Landscape

Why Choose Retaining Walls?

Retaining walls are more than just a structural necessity—they are a versatile design feature that can enhance the beauty and functionality of your landscape. They help prevent soil erosion, manage water runoff, and create usable level spaces on sloped properties. Our expertly crafted retaining walls not only add visual appeal but also increase your property value while providing long-term structural support.

Wall types we build

Segmental block, such as Allan Block. This is what we build most often. Interlocking concrete units set on a compacted gravel base, stepped back course by course so the wall leans into the slope it is holding. It handles curves and corners, it can be reinforced with geogrid where the height demands it, and the finish is consistent from end to end.

Pressure-treated timber. Lower cost, quick to build and it suits rustic yards and low garden terraces. The trade-off is honest: wood in a wet climate has a shorter service life than concrete block, so we recommend it for low walls and for budgets that need to stretch, not for structural walls holding a driveway.

Boulder walls. Placed rock, machine set, with the biggest stones at the base. They look like they grew out of the site, they drain freely by nature, and they are a good answer on larger sloped lots where a manufactured block would look too tidy. They need machine access and room to work.

Drainage behind the wall is the whole job

Walls almost never fail because the blocks were weak. They fail because water got trapped behind them. Saturated soil pushes on a wall with far more force than dry soil, and in this climate the soil behind a wall spends a lot of the year wet. So the part of our work you will never see is the part that decides whether the wall is still straight in fifteen years.

Behind every wall we build we place a column of clean drain rock, not native soil, wide enough to keep water moving down instead of sideways into the blocks. At the base of that column sits a perforated pipe laid to fall and daylighted or tied into the storm system. We wrap the drain rock in filter fabric so silt from the backfill cannot migrate in and clog it, and we add weep points through the face where a gravity outlet is not available. Backfill goes in and gets compacted in lifts as the wall rises, never dumped in one go at the end.

When an engineer is required

As a general rule across Greater Vancouver municipalities, a wall over 1.2 metres, about 4 feet, of exposed face needs to be designed by a structural engineer and permitted. So does a shorter wall carrying a surcharge, meaning a load sitting on the soil above it such as a driveway, a parking pad, a pool, a building or a steep slope above the wall. If your wall falls into either category we say so at the estimate rather than after you have accepted, we coordinate the engineer, and we build to the drawings and the inspections that come with them.

Terracing sloped lots

On a steep lot, two or three shorter walls stepped up the slope often beat one tall wall. Each wall stays under the height that triggers engineering, you get usable flat ground between them for lawn, planting or a patio, and the cost per wall is lower. The catch is that terraces have to be spaced far enough apart that the upper wall is not loading the lower one, and each terrace needs its own drainage. We work that out on site with the grades in front of us, not from a photo.

What it costs

Typical ranges in Greater Vancouver, for the exposed face of the wall:

• Segmental block: typically $50 to $90 per square foot of face, more where geogrid, engineering or difficult access is involved.
• Pressure-treated timber: typically $35 to $60 per square foot of face.
• Boulder walls: typically $45 to $95 per square foot of face, driven mostly by rock size and machine access.

As a rough per-linear-foot figure, a 3 foot high block wall usually lands around $150 to $270 per linear foot installed. Excavation, disposal of spoil, drain rock, pipe, engineering and any caps or steps are itemized separately in your quote. Every wall we build is covered by our 1-year workmanship warranty.

Timeline

A short garden wall of 20 to 30 linear feet is usually 3 to 5 working days. A 60 to 80 foot block wall at around 3 feet high typically runs 1 to 2 weeks. Engineered walls, terraced systems and anything needing a permit run longer, mostly because of the approvals rather than the building. Your written quote comes back within 24 hours of the free on-site estimate.