There are a multitude of moving parts to contend with in the East End landscaping business: managing climate change, trending client preferences and staffing in a seasonally skewed region when your business is a year-round operation, to name a few. There are also pressures to consolidate, as many in the industry have. But despite the many offers to merge or sell, Groundworks Landscaping in East Hampton is firmly rooted right where it already is: as a heritage company made anew, with an infusion of young talent and a sustainable vision for the future.
Co-owner Kim Hren met her future business partner when Linda Silich came to work for what was then Hren Nurseries in 2001. By spring of next year, Linda and her husband, Andy, who she met in 1986 when they started new jobs on the same day at the same company, started talking to Kim about working together. By July 2002, those talks had evolved into the formation of Groundworks.
“It started in our basement and progressed to a small office in town to acquiring Kim’s family business in our beautiful headquarters in East Hampton,” says Linda.
The Groundworks founding trio each came to the landscaping business with different back-grounds that meshed well. There’s Ohio-born Linda, who has an education in speech and business marketing, and East-Ender Andy as the business guy. Kim, meanwhile, was born and raised in East Hampton and has a degree in environmental design. She also holds a pedigree as a third-generation horticulturist in the family’s namesake business.
“My grandfather started a garden center here in 1939 and I grew up right behind [it],” Kim says of her lifetime in landscaping. Her dad, Joseph Hren, took the garden center over from his father when he was 18 and she followed suit, joining the family business after college in 1988. But an entrepreneurial spark inspired her to strike out on her own with the Silichs to launch Ground-works, a business that focuses more keenly on landscaping services for the ample acreage that comprises the Hamptons.
Projects like this modern home on Old Montauk Highway were softened with seamless natural accents by the Groundworks team. (Photos courtesy of Groundworks Landscaping)
When Kim’s dad was looking toward retirement and thinking about selling, it seemed like a natural transition to look to his lineage. Kim and her partners took over the real estate at 530 Montauk Highway, closed the garden center and incorporated what remained into the current business in 2013.
“So, I’ve worked here pretty much all my life,” Kim says. “I guess I never really left home.”
With 59 employees working in the back office and in the design, build and maintenance divisions, Groundworks is solidly grounded on the East End, working primarily from Southampton to Montauk.
Andy serves as president and chief financial officer, managing and overseeing the nuts and bolts. With her marketing background, Linda does a lot on the sales side but has also come into her own as a designer. Kim handles the physical design and partners with Linda on client presentation.
And the company is quietly evolving again, with a new generation of family members on board and their cohorts — all of them likewise grounded, ensuring the future of Groundworks remains deeply rooted.
A movement toward au naturel
Although many homeowners in the Hamptons are wed to their privet hedges, cutting gardens and ornamental cultivars, Linda notes that “Many clients are searching for a more laid-back environment around their home.”
In tune with the current trend toward plants that are both regenerative and historically acclimated to the local environment, the move toward less manicured, more natural properties is in high demand from South Fork clientele.
“They’re requesting more native plant material, like native dogwoods, bayberry, clethra hummingbird and native grasses, and looking for their planting beds to be less formal and more with nature,” Linda says.
The same goes for hardscaping. She calls out a rise in popularity of reclaimed stone that offers a more Old-World look and a softening of borders around firepit areas and outdoor showers, using plants to define boundaries or walls instead of wood and hard materials.
Both designers say these trends coincide with how people are using their outdoor spaces. Says Linda, “The outdoors is more of a family situation and less formal, or more multipurpose with seating areas, water features, paths and conversation areas.”
Kim finds that clients want gardens that are easier to care for, utilizing more perennials and or-namental grasses in pursuit of less time weeding and more time relaxing with family and friends.
They don’t want to be out cutting flowers all the time, or deadheading and things like that,” she says. “They want low maintenance. They just don’t want to be out there every Saturday and Sunday of their summer.”
That isn’t to say clients don’t want the visual and aromatic benefits of a beautiful, flowering garden — they’re just not interested in the toil required after they’ve already made a three-hour trek on the Long Island Expressway. And this is where Groundworks has found another value-added angle to their business: its maintenance division. The service relieves homeowners of the tedium of weeding, mowing, mulching and pruning. The company provides general property care customized to clients’ needs and timeframes — even weekly visits, if desired.
“We’re mostly known for our landscape designs and implementation of them,” says Linda, “[but] maintenance is our fastest-growing division.”
Designing women
Project design falls mainly to Kim and Linda, who each have their own areas of expertise. Kim manages plant material acquisition, yard organization and CAD-assisted drawings, while Linda builds peer relationships with other architects, builders, contractors and third-party vendors; she also assists account managers with landscape plans.
Together and with their larger team, the two take on projects large and small, mostly concen-trating on residential, from traditional summer cottages and estates to contemporary state-ment homes.
For a modern house by the bay in East Hampton, the challenge was to create an envelope around the home, right on the edge of a street that dead-ends into a marina. Doing so meant devising a design that complied with local revegetation regulations while restoring the natural vegetation, much of which had been damaged during construction.
“They wanted to close [the house] off the street but also create a natural feel and not lose sense of the waterway,” Kim says. She worked with plantings like Crepe Myrtles and ornamen-tal grasses to create a soft contrast against the backdrop of the home’s modern architecture.
“I wanted just a clean, simple palette of plants in the front of the house and to play off the ar-chitecture,” she says. “I didn’t want anything too stiff because then that would have played off the squareness of the house. I wanted it to soften the house.”
The effect was simple but not minimalist, the roundness of the hydrangeas and fountain grass-es giving a pillowy effect along the pathways and focal points.
With the brunt of their projects focused from Montauk to Southampton, Groundworks has grown beyond its grassroots origins but it maintains its family-run feel. (Photos courtesy of Groundworks Landscaping)
For a renovated farmhouse home in Amagansett, the goal was figuring out how to link various areas — small gardens and entertainment areas such as the pool and outdoor kitchen — but also provide separation for the different experiences those things provide. The difficulty was resolved via steppingstones with grass joints and rows of alliums and hedges that defined bor-ders and provided pathways between the areas.
“I wanted to keep them separate, but the garden beds along the borders actually link them so they direct your eye from one area to the next,” Kim says.
A particular challenge at the Amagansett site was how to take the edge off the modern garage, a hulking square set in the midst of the otherwise bucolic setting. Kim chose a series of tall Ju-nipers to offset the squat building. “It was a little awkward, but I think it really worked. I liked the way that played off the modern architecture,” she says.
Staying the course
Twenty-four years after starting their company, Kim, Linda and Andy remain as dedicated about creating plant-perfect spaces as the day their homegrown business began. That devotion ap-pears to have rubbed off on the rest of the family.
Linda and Andy’s son Patrick Silich is a project manager; Andy’s sister Cat Bahns is the office administrator; nephew Austin is an estimator and Kim’s cousin Jake Beyer is a buyer who was recently made a partner and is taking on the mantle of focusing on the future of the company. Linda and Andy’s daughter Erica Daunt works in marketing and account coordination.
“When you have such enthusiastic young people working for you who really love what they do, as much as I love what I do, it’s really exciting,” Linda says. “It’s almost like a second part of the business. The primary business is the design, the garden, the landscape, and then the sec-ondary business is mentoring this staff of young people. I almost like a college professor, trying to teach and show and see how they take hold and are doing it themselves. It’s very rewarding, very enjoyable, especially for me.”
For Kim, the succession and “grow your own” philosophy is especially meaningful in a time of mergers and acquisitions and consolidations on the East End. “It’s happening all throughout our industry… we get calls every week from companies asking us if we want to sell,” she says.
The answer is always an unequivocal “no.”
If Kim were to rewrite the adage “What’s old is new again,” she might say “What’s old is new again… and again.”
“We’re very team and company oriented,” she says. “We’re constantly tweaking what we do. I’m happy to help the next generation try to succeed and find their way and we’re just really in a good spot right now.”
