Starting out in 1988 as a small residential landscape design and installation firm, Mark’s Creative Landscape — serving Chicago’s North Shore and Southeast Wisconsin — has grown steadily over the years and now serves both residential customers and higher-budget commercial clients.

The Challenge

Recently, a small commercial client in Northbrook, Il., contracted them for a project that required living walls. Increasingly popular, living walls are self-sufficient vertical gardens; plants are rooted in a structure attached directly to the walls themselves, making for a lush, green façade when in bloom.

Residential living wall structures are available in prefabricated kits, but there is no such option for large-scale commercial needs. Mark’s Creative Landscape required high-quality, reliable wire rope assemblies to create two sturdy, gridded walls. One wall would be 12 feet wide and 14 feet tall, and the other would be 39 feet wide and 14 feet tall.

The Solution

Mark’s Creative Landscape contacted the team at Lexco and provided drawings.

For the cable itself, we used 5/32-inch 7×7 300 Series Stainless Steel architectural wire rope. For the vertical assemblies, we used fixed balls on one end and threaded studs — with a custom thread length of 4 inches — on the other. For the horizontal assemblies, which were much longer, we opted for threaded studs on both ends to ensure adjustability. All fasteners were also made from 300 Series Stainless Steel.

The Result

We cut the architectural wire rope, hand swaged all ends, fabricating each custom assembly in-house, and delivered the full order of 29 custom assemblies to Mark’s Creative Landscape within one week after ordering.

When looking for a manufacturer for their unique custom wire rope assembly, Mark’s Creative Landscape had several boxes to check off: They wanted a local vendor, a stock of readily available architectural cable railing, competitive pricing, short lead times, and full design and assembly capabilities. With Lexco^® Cable, they were able to meet all of these requirements and successfully completed the living wall project with no complications or delays.