Where The Green Grass Grows
By Elizabeth Hoppe
By Elizabeth Hoppe
In 1958, a landscaping company with half a dozen employees and a couple trucks began servicing homes in the Highland Park and Highwood neighborhoods in Chicago. Led by Vito Mariani Sr., the company quickly earned a reputation for its impeccable service and attention to detail—and the referrals never stopped coming.
Now, almost 60 years later, the company continues to thrive. When Vito Sr. could no longer run the business due to health reasons, his son Frank stepped in to help along his two brothers, and that’s when the company sharpened its focus and became a leader in architectural landscape design as well as maintenance work. Twenty years ago, Mariani Landscape started servicing the Southwest and Western suburbs in addition to its expanding client base on the North Shore, and its focus on authentic and beautiful architectural design continues to set Mariani apart.
Now during the season, Mariani Landscape has 400 associates and in excess of 125 trucks. The regular client base includes 1,200 regular maintenance clients, as well as numerous special design and construction projects under way at any given time. “There’s a lot going on here,” says Frank Mariani Jr., the division manager for the Southwest and Western suburbs division. Mariani Landscape is a full-service landscape and architecture design company, managing everything from lawn and garden care to full-blown design and construction projects and snow removal.
“You have a big push now for an extended reach of living space outside the home,” Mariani Jr. says, including outdoor rooms with eating areas, seating areas, fireplaces, fire pits, outdoor kitchens, pergolas, and more.
Mariani Landscape can be the single contact for a homeowner, overseeing subcontractors for design and installation of all these components, as well as the main point of contact for the entire project. And though a lot of their work ramps up in the spring, especially for regular maintenance clients, work on some of these bigger projects begins much earlier—sometimes years ahead of time.
And then there are the plants. One of the key things Mariani Landscape prides itself on is the quality of its plants, trees, shrubs, and more. In fact, Mariani runs a separate nursery division where it grows its own products (and even sells to other landscape companies) to deliver the absolute best product to its clients. Because of the company-run nursery, Mariani has total control of the look, health, and timing of the plants.
In addition, the company has been a leader in sustainable landscaping practices, long before there was ever a desire for it.
“We use a lot of native plants and plants that are indigenous to this area because they require less maintenance,” Mariani Jr. says.
The company has a sustainability committee, which helps to come up with new sustainability initiatives year after year. The applications used on Mariani client properties are phosphorous-free, and fertilizers are organic, for example. The committee has even gone as far as figuring out the shortest routes for drivers to reduce carbon emissions when servicing homes, and Mariani vehicles have the latest start-and-stop technologies to save energy.
And all those efforts are well and good, but Mariani wouldn’t retain its clients, even despite all those efforts, if the actual work wasn’t exceptional. But it is exceptional, and it’s consistently that way.
“We have some designers that have been with us for almost 30 years,” Mariani Jr. says.
The wide breadth of designers allows Mariani Landscape to fulfill many different types of client visions—from a formal cottage garden to a minimalist rooftop terrace to a prairie retreat.
“Each individual design is client driven,” he adds.
There isn’t a “Mariani signature look.” Instead, designers and associates work to fulfill each client’s vision and dreams.
In an industry that’s always changing due to weather patterns, the economy, homeowner likes and dislikes, and overall trends, it can be difficult for a company to last a single generation. But Mariani Landscape is now a third-generation, family-owned company that started small, and because of its impeccable service, has grown to be the highly respected company it is today.
To learn more about Mariani Landscape, call 630-771-0074, or visit marianilandscape.com, where you can view a portfolio of projects.
Sign Up for the JWC Media Email