An Article on How to Design Decks in Deck Specialist Magazine!

Our founder, Lawrence Winterburn, has a new article in the May/June 2026 issue of Deck Specialist. It is called “The Architecture of the Deck,” and it is Part 1 of a three-part series on designing decks the way architects and landscape designers actually work.

After 40 years of designing and building, one thing stands out about how trained designers approach a project. They read the site before they draw anything. Most decks get designed backwards. A homeowner describes what they want, someone measures the back of the house, a sketch appears, and the deck is sized to the budget. The piece makes the case that everything separating an adequate deck from an excellent one happens before that sketch is ever drawn.

What Part 1 covers

The article walks through the process every architecture and landscape program teaches in its first semester, translated for deck builders and the homeowners they work with:

Taking a real site inventory, the grade, the drainage, the trees, the setbacks, and the utilities, so the design answers to the actual property. Reading the environment, which way the deck faces, where the sun lands at the hours you really use the space, where the wind comes from, and which views to open up or screen off. And defining what the space has to do before a single line is drawn, so the deck becomes a set of purposeful rooms rather than one flat platform.

It is written for builders, but any homeowner planning a project will recognize the questions a good designer should be asking before talking price.

Our thanks to the team at Deck Specialist for the opportunity to share this with the trade. It is a genuine honor to contribute to a magazine read by outdoor living professionals across North America.

Watch for Parts 2 and 3 in the next two issues. Part 2 moves from reading the site to drawing the deck, and Part 3 continues the series. We will post a link here as each one goes live.