Revit Modelling for Garden Connections Inc.

Garden Connections (GC) is a start-up offering web-based solutions to support residential developers and home buyers with their landscaping and gardening projects. Founded on the vision of creating: “a beautiful garden for every home ®”, GC specializes in the virtual staging and matching of gardens with new homes and condos. Their online virtualization tool (currently in development) allows users to preview garden styles, browse relevant products and contract services, and access information to help them create beautiful gardens with low carbon footprints and energy consumption, incorporating new conservation and water retention technologies. An underlying guiding principle is that the designs and products matched with homes and their lots conform to the standards of “The Sustainable Sites Initiative” adopted by the Canadian Nursery Landscape Association. This set of standards is a landscape initiative equivalent to LEED for green construction and technology. GC’s online platform connects both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) users to designers, product and service providers within the home building and landscape industries. The platform also links buyers to realtors who want to provide garden customization options to their clients to increase the home and property value.

GC aims to become a one-stop-shop for support on outdoor projects by bringing these service providers, consultants and product suppliers together in an easy-to-access portal known as the “Home & Garden Selector®”. The target commercial and residential users of the Home & Garden Selector® typically lack knowledge of gardening/landscaping practices, styles, products and processes. The application will help users navigate four styles of gardens, associated products, and recommended service providers based on the users’ preferences and location. Users will benefit from a greater understanding of options within current garden styles / trends and what they should look for in suppliers and services. As well, home buyers and realtors will have access to a suite of tools for value-added customization for landscapes, front lawns, and balconies (for condominium buyers).

The Home & Garden Selector® has two groups of users: 1) realtors, developers and buyers of customized front lawn gardens for (semi)detached houses; 2) condominium realtors, developers and buyers for high-end customized balcony gardens. Frederick Hann, President & CEO, has approached GBC for support in the creation of 2D and 3D balcony models for inclusion in the first iteration of the Home & Garden Selector® tool. The first round of research with GBC will focus on delivering balcony designs to be included in the sales process for the Shangri-La in Toronto. These models of balcony layouts will also include options for previewing 4 different garden styles at 3 price points (with a variety of products, materials, supplier combinations for each style and price). This will allow GC to upgrade the quality of design assets used in their virtualization tools for condo balcony gardens, as well as increase speed-to-market on the release of the Home & Garden Selector® with the full catalogue of consumer options.

Students and faculty from GBC’s School of Architectural Studies will be engaged to carry out the modelling work using Revit modelling tools. This early modelling work lends itself to continued partnership between GBC and GC as they attempt to identify software solutions for future large-scale virtualization projects with developers. Possibilities exist to engage GBC’s School of Architectural Studies in development of a proprietary BIM tool, which will enable developers to upload their own design assets to the Home & Garden Selector® system and reduce the reliance on GC for producing renders of supplier product designs. Ongoing development of the Home and Garden Selector® web-based software also presents opportunities to engage Programming and Business Systems Analyst students.