Why Work With WPL?
Unified Design, In-House Expertise, Equal Ownership, Local.
Our company provides a core group of licensed professionals and seasoned staff to help you navigate through the design and development process for your site. We fulfill many different roles in projects as either a primary consultant or a subconsultant and for public, private, or non-profit clients. We are skilled at doing conceptual design work and technical construction plans, and everything in between. Whether it is your backyard, a hotel, or a city master plan, we are ready to partner with you toward making beautiful, affordable, and efficient places in our community.
Unified Design
All three disciplines are involved in our key projects from the onset. This means our designs are beautiful, accurate, and practical at a very early stage.
In-House Expertise
Our surveyors, engineers, and landscape architects are all in-house and communicate with each other constantly. This means less time is wasted by having to call and email another company for these services and waiting on returned calls. It also means fewer costs for our clients since we are not marking up these services like an out-of-house consultant.
Equal Ownership
Our three primary disciplines are represented equally in our firm’s ownership. Surveying, Engineering, and Landscape Architecture get an equal say in our project direction and design philosophy. This balance allows only the best ideas to thrive, and project design alternatives are not filtered from our clients by one primary discipline as in other multidiscipline offices.
Local
- Commissioned as the local design consultant for larger, out of town, and nationally recognized firms
- Know how to apply broad concepts on local level
- Invested in the community designing for
- Understand the geography, politics, and social behavior
- We have the institutional memory to know what works and what doesn’t
Additional Strengths
Cross Training
Our staff is cross-trained in all three disciplines and fundamentals of each other’s practice. This allows our project managers to communicate more effectively with each other and our clients, and it allows project managers to anticipate each other’s needs, saving you time and money on your project.
Variable Service Level
Since our staff is well versed in all three disciplines, we are able to cater to many project types of various sizes and needs. From large scale master planning to a small commercial parking lot, our staff is trained to work on grandiose visions or code-minimum plans and for large corporations or local home owners. This flexibility allows our clients the ability to make changes on the fly, expanding or contracting their scope of work due to budget and schedule constraints all while knowing that we have them covered.
Institutional Memory
As one of the few half-century-old survey firms still surviving in Tidewater, it is hard to work anywhere in the region without stumbling upon the same site we previously surveyed if not onto a neighboring site. Our extensive library enables us to research our properties quicker and save you time getting research and history for your site. This information helps our engineering and landscape architecture since we are certain to get more accurate base maps from work done previously.
We Are Small
- Flexibility
- Quantity of projects is limited as compared to larger firms, so we can focus more on each project
- Rates reflect smaller overhead
- Personable to clients, no matter how small a project
Focus on Service
- Less waste on marble floors and high-end office real estate, means more reduced costs for clients
- We educate our clients so they know what we are doing for them, and why
- Return calls
- Return emails
- Less email, more in-person
Residential Experience
- No other design firm does what we do in this particular market (CBPA)
- 25% of our practice
- We bring the big project experience to residential clients
- We bring the residential CBPA experience to bigger projects
- All design staff has some experience at this smaller design scale, which means more double checking and collaboration
Long Term Employees
- Core staff has been with the company for many years and our relationships have developed with clients over the years which is a prime example of exceptional workmanship and trust
- Less turn-over than most firms, means less likely to have a project manager change mid-project
- Staff has grown and matured, are more knowledgeable and more efficient