Valley Crest is no stranger to big landscaping projects.
It completely re-sodded Atlanta’s Olympic Stadium within 36 hours after opening ceremonies, spruced up the Las Vegas strip with 1,300 palm trees and 84,000 shrubs, and landscaped all of Walt Disney Co.’s master planned community in Florida.
But the single most challenging project in the 48-year history of the company could be a two-acre garden a short drive from the firm’s headquarters in Calabasas.
At the Getty Center in the hills of Brentwood, Valley Crest is planting an azalea garden a concentric maze of red and pink flowering plants floating in a reflecting pool located in the Central Garden.
The azalea pool is just a portion of the center’s 130 acres of landscaped grounds, where Valley Crest’s seven-year, $10-million contract also calls for installation of elaborate irrigation systems and the planting of several thousand trees.
But to Valley Crest founder and owner Burton Sperber, the garden is the one component that must complement the world-class art and architecture of the Getty, which opens to the public in mid-December.
“It’s a work of art,” he said. “That garden is going to be as beautiful and astounding as the billion-dollar buildings that surround it.”
Sperber is quick to point out that Valley Crest did not design the Getty Center’s gardens (L.A. environmental artist Robert Irwin did). “We’re just builders,” he said. “We’re not designers; we’re implementers.”
Sperber notes that the Garden’s “pristine, structured” appearance is by careful design. In 1993, Valley Crest prepared a 154-page document that broke the job site into 56 individual planting sequences.
It’s a complicated process, but Valley Crest, the nation’s largest landscape and site construction firm, is accustomed to implementing landscape designs on a grand scale.
Sperber started the company in 1949 when he bought a retail nursery and residential landscape company in North Hollywood for $250.
Today, closely held Valley Crest has nine regional offices and projected 1997 revenues of $300 million.
Its operations include gas-recovery systems, golf course development and maintenance, and providing and decorating Christmas trees for corporate clients.
Some of its major jobs have included the indoor landscaping of the Denver International Airport, constructing the “Africa” and “Asia” sections of the new Animal Kingdom attraction at Disney World in Florida and installing the artificial turf on the playing field of Texas Stadium.
Several recent contracts have been closer to home. Along with the Getty Center contract, Valley Crest is about to begin a 10-month, $19.2-million project for Phase II of its Queensway Bay Rainbow Harbor project, a seaside entertainment and retail development in Long Beach.
Under the contract, Valley Crest will be responsible for constructing a marina of eight floating docks, a recreational area adjacent to the new aquarium and the utilities infrastructure for the entire site.
Valley Crest was selected in part because the majority of the site-work involves landscaping, irrigation and grading “what they excel at,” said Mike Spaulding, vice president of Costa Mesa-based Fong & Associates Inc., which is designing the Queensway Bay landscape.
Spaulding has worked with Valley Crest on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters in downtown Los Angeles and the renovation of the park surrounding the L.A. County Museum of Art.
“From the initial paperwork to the finishing stages and turning (the project) over to the developer,” he said, “every aspect of their performance is solid.”
Unlike many landscape companies, Valley Crest does not subcontract its labor. It maintains a staff of 4,700 who can provide everything from initial proprietary estimates through long-term maintenance.
“Some people call us a conglomerate, but all of our company’s functions are pretty much similar they tie together to do site beautification work,” Sperber said.
That vertically integrated approach gives Valley Crest an advantage in getting contracts like the Getty.
“It’s easier to coordinate when you have one company that controls all the aspects,” said Kip Drabeck of Dinwiddie Construction, who is on-site manager at the Getty Center. “It’s more efficient than having to send out for numerous, small contracts.”
The Getty’s 134,000-square-foot Central Garden, which cradles the azalea pool, is designed to be the visual centerpiece of all the landscaped terraces. The garden begins with a walkway that traverses a creek flowing from a cut-stone grotto that gradually descends into a plaza planted with bougainvillea arbors.
The stream ends in a cascade of water into a central reflecting pool. Within the pool is a series of concentric, circular planters resembling Native American designs, filled with azaleas to create the illusion of a floating hedge.
The azaleas have been growing in full-scale mockup at the Getty Villa in Malibu for the past four years in order to fit into the environmental artist’s design.
Valley Crest is currently disassembling the mockups into 4-foot sections and shipping the modules to the Getty Center, where they are lifted by crane into the planter rings area and set into place by hand, essentially re-constructing the rings like a jigsaw puzzle.
Valley Crest’s involvement with the Getty began in 1990, when it relocated existing oak trees out of the way of construction and performed erosion control planting and slope repair work. About 50 percent of Valley Crest’s work has involved the planting of the slope areas of the site, which have been reforested with 8,000 native oaks and 1,800 other trees, including eucalyptus, citrus and jacaranda. Valley Crest has shared the landscaping work with Canoga Park-based American Landscape Inc.
Valley Crest’s landscape construction division generates about 70 percent of the revenues for the firm’s holding company, Environmental Industries Inc.
In some ways, the nursery subsidiary, called Valley Crest Tree Co., is the most visible. When the company moved a 250-ton tree in Orange County earlier this year, most local news stations carried footage. (“Must’ve been a slow news day,” Sperber said.)
More visible still are the better than 10 miles of containerized trees and shrubs spread across the company’s regional headquarters on Lopez Canyon Road in the northeast San Fernando Valley.
Sperber oversees all three divisions as president and chief executive of Environmental Industries, which was formed in the late 1960s when the company briefly went public. The Sperber family bought the company back in the mid-1970s and has retained the holding company so all the divisions could “concentrate on the technical side while corporate headquarters worries about the money,” Sperber said.
Environmental Industries has been based in an office building ringed by Canary Island Date Palm trees, just off the Ventura freeway in Calabasas, since 1980.
The company is largely a family affair: Burt Sperber, 68, is president and chief executive of the parent company; his son, Richard, is president of the landscape construction division; his brother, Stuart, is president of the nursery; and Bruce Wilson, who is not related to Sperber, is president of the maintenance division.
Sperber said he intends to stay at the helm of his company “until my head falls on the desk.”
“We pretty much do exactly the same thing we did when we started 48 years ago,” Sperber said. “We just do more of it.”
