A one-person studio. Sixteen years in.
I’m Lavar Ahmad Williams, the designer and the one with mud on his boots. Pine & Magnolia is the studio I started in 2009 to do the kind of small, careful garden work I love.
I grew up between Minden and Shreveport, the kind of north Louisiana childhood where summer meant a screen door slapping shut behind you, the smell of cut grass and a grandfather who could name every tree on the block. He’s the reason I do this.
I studied landscape architecture at LSU, spent a few seasons working under a stone mason in the Hill Country, then came home in 2009 and hung a small wooden sign on the porch of a rented bungalow on Woods Street. Pine & Magnolia has lived in that same little office ever since.
Today the studio is still just me — and a notebook, and a 2014 pickup, and a network of local nurseries and stone yards I’ve been working with for years. I take on a small number of projects each season so I can stay involved from the first walk-through to the final pruning notes.
I’d rather plant fewer things, better. I’d rather build one good stone path than three mediocre ones. And I’d rather come back in March to check on a Japanese magnolia I planted six years ago than chase the next job.
A new garden looks like a garden in year three. We design for that arc on day one.
Plants chosen for Webster Parish soil and 8b summers — not whatever the big-box has on sale.
One designer, one estimate, one phone number. The number that picks up is mine.
