WILL SEABROOK · SALTGRASS LANDSCAPES
Will Seabrook spent the first part of his career building things — retaining walls, drainage systems, the structural work that makes outdoor spaces function before they can be made to feel like anything. He came to landscape design from the ground up, literally. By the time he started taking on full design commissions, he'd already spent years watching what happened when the engineering was wrong, and what happened when it was right.
That background shapes how he approaches every project. Before a plant goes in the ground, before a stone is laid, Will reads the site: where the water moves, where the wind comes from, what the soil is doing, what the land is already trying to become. The design follows that reading. Not the other way around.
Saltgrass takes on eight to twelve residential projects a year across Tasmania's east coast — Coal River Valley, the Freycinet peninsula, the Tasman Peninsula and the country between. The scale is deliberate. Each project gets the time it needs, which is usually more than the client expects at the outset.
Will works with a small number of trusted contractors — stonemasons, earthworkers, timber millers — most of them from the same region as the projects themselves. Local material, local knowledge, local hands. The results tend to look like they belong because they do.
There are no maintenance contracts. The gardens Saltgrass builds are designed to require minimal intervention once established. If a garden needs constant attention to look right, something in the design is working against the site rather than with it.
The best time to involve Will is earlier than most people think. Before the landscaping phase, ideally. Sometimes before the architect has finished the plans — site orientation, drainage, the relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces are easier to resolve at the design stage than after the slab is poured.
If you have a site on the east coast that's been difficult — steep, coastal, exposed, or simply land you haven't known how to start with — an early conversation costs nothing and tends to change the scope of what's possible.
Saltgrass doesn't take on every project it's approached about. The ones Will selects are the ones where the site has something worth working with, and where the client is prepared to let the land have some say in the outcome.
Those projects tend to be the ones that look right for decades. Start a conversation