Landscape Designer

Design in the Colorado high country, and learn it from people who have spent their careers here.

Ceres+ is the landscape architecture studio inside Ceres Landcare, which has been designing, building and caring for landscapes in the Colorado high country since 1981. Six designers work out of the Eagle office, and the firm has stayed small on purpose. The work shows it: meadowscape planting held inside steel planters and low site walls, a boulder-and-stone slab staircase that tightens the approach before passing through a gap in a serviceberry hedgerow, a cantilevered glass-bottomed pool, a pond alive with trout, and twenty-five thousand square feet of thirsty bluegrass turned back into meadow under a stand of mature aspens.

The properties are what you would expect in this valley: ski-in, ski-out homes, mountain estates and sprawling ranches, owners who care as much about the landscape as they do about the architecture, and civic work like the gateways at Edwards and Arrowhead. Difficult sites, design review boards and a short building season come with the territory. Because the same company that draws the plan builds it and then cares for it season after season, your drawings get built by people down the hall, and you get to watch how they hold up.

Every project here runs the same arc, and you will touch all of it:

This is the seat the whole studio leans on. You will work directly with the studio’s principal and its senior designers, supporting their projects and taking on more of the design work yourself as your skills build.

The design work. Most of your week is spent designing: plans and construction documents in AutoCAD, concepts in digital hand drawing, deliverable sheets and image boards that go in front of clients. This studio designs with restraint, proportion and an honest use of materials, so the details carry real weight, and the craft you build here is what separates a strong school portfolio from a professional one.

Working with the team. You will support several projects at once across the senior designers, so staying organized and knowing what each one needs from you is a real part of the job. Communication runs throughout the day here rather than in scheduled check-ins, which means you always know where a project stands and where you are needed next, and nobody expects you to work something out alone.

Getting out of the office. You will visit sites to take measurements for base drawings and to see how the work is coming together in the field. That is where the design lessons land fastest.

Approvals and water. You will help carry submittals through HOAs, design review boards and municipalities, and you will learn how water shapes nearly every design decision at this elevation.

Variety. No two days look quite the same. Priorities shift, a site visit lands in the middle of an afternoon, and you become the person the team can hand something to knowing it will get done. If that sounds energizing rather than exhausting, you will like it here.

• One to three years out of school. At least a year in a design office where you got fast and confident in CAD. If you are coming from a design-build or a smaller shop, closer to two.
• Strong production skills. You can sit down and produce clean, accurate work in the software that matters. School teaches a little of everything, and this is where you go deep.
• The tools. AutoCAD is the base drawing platform, concepts move into digital hand drawing on an iPad in Morpholio or something like it, construction documents come back into AutoCAD, and Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator run through the whole process. Moving easily between them is the skill.
• Initiative. You take something on and move it…