The Glengate Company is the premier landscape, pool, and lifestyle company in New England. It provides its discerning clients with a degree of expertise and quality that is unmatched in the industry and takes the stress out of outdoor living projects including garden and landscape design and installation as well as pool design, build, and renovation, and even year-round property and pool care.
Our properties are our sanctuaries with beautiful landscaping, stunning gardens, or swimming pools and pool houses. There is no feeling like spending time after work or on weekends relaxing and enjoying our personal outdoor space with family and friends.
There are many landscaping businesses, but the challenge for homeowners is not just finding the right company, but ensuring those companies can offer the diverse professional expertise such as landscape architects, garden designers, horticulturists, and pool designers and builders necessary to fulfill their outdoor visions. Although it is possible for homeowners to source and hire independent specialists themselves, this is time-consuming and getting them to work together is often problematic, with scheduling issues, cost overruns, and projects rarely being completed to client satisfaction.
Enter the Glengate Company, based in the stately historic southwestern Connecticut town of Wilton and a brief commute to many of the world’s best-known Fortune 500 companies.
“We don’t serve the masses,” says Glengate Managing Partner and Owner Jordy Scott. “We serve those who want great design, great engineering, and great installation and workmanship with concierge levels of individual service. Our price point tends to be a little higher than many competitors, and that’s because we have experts in every single role and offer unparalleled levels of personal service.”
Its in-house team of specialists includes experienced landscape architects, garden designers, horticulturists, pool designers, craftsmen and both pool and property care managers. With its comprehensive services, the Glengate Company provides a single point of contact for homeowners who expect nothing less than the best.
Glengate’s value as a design, engineering, and construction house cannot be underestimated. Because the company is responsible for both design and build, it means that projects are completed in about two-thirds of the time it would take homeowners if they went to separate landscape architect, pool design and engineering and construction sources. And since one company is handling every facet of the project, there are no unexpected monetary surprises.
“Sometimes people think when you work with a design-build business, there may be a higher cost to it upfront, but we are a comprehensive provider and know how to think through and anticipate and integrate all of the project elements and costs. So while the costs of our projects may appear more expensive upfront, when you add in the costs from individual providers our clients quickly see our final costs are not out of line at all. We never skimp on anything, but over the decades, we’ve been able to assemble all these experts together and work very efficiently.”
The origins of family owned and operated Glengate go back many years. While he was in the hospital in 1937, recuperating from a war injury, Jordy’s grandfather heard large excavators working outside his room. He was tired of being cooped up in the hospital for months and made a point of going outside every day, talking to workers and learning how to excavate. He returned home to Woodbury, Connecticut once he had healed, and started Scott Swimming Pools, the first swimming pool builder and landscape company in the state.
His son, Jordy’s father, worked alongside him in the business and formed Glengate Company in 1972, with a young Jordy helping. “The vision my dad conceived when he founded the company still guides us today,” says Scott, “and at its very core is artistry of design and passion for service.”
Jordy remembers his father’s frustration seeing other pool building services that usually consisted of “two guys in a pickup truck placing a couple of rocks and a few lollipop-shaped shrubs around a pool and calling that landscaping.”
The senior Scott knew that he could do much better and brought together all necessary services for residential property development under one roof. This would include landscape architects as well as experts to handle permits, site work, landscaping, irrigation, lighting, fences, stone masonry, pool houses — everything a homeowner needs to create a luxurious setting. Customers soon flocked to Glengate and highly recommended the company to others. And to this day, Glengate clients remain the company’s most important source of referred business.
“We weren’t always the expert in everything, but we invested in developing the expertise,” says Jordy. “We are at the point now where we are world class, working for top of the food chain clients, doing everything with great expertise. There really isn’t a business out there that does what we do. It would take way too much effort and energy to pull it together. It just happened to be my dad’s vision.”
Maintaining the same commitment to clients that was set forth by his father, Jordy eventually bought the business from his dad and his brothers.
“This business is in our DNA,” he says. “I am the third generation and have two adult children in the business now, so there are four generations of Scotts dating back to being the first in Connecticut,” states Scott. Family ownership history going back over eighty years means a great deal to the company and benefits clients.
Since employees treat projects with the same care and consideration that they would if they were doing the work for their own families, it comes across in the quality of workmanship and attention to every detail.
Treating employees as family members has fostered a great deal of loyalty, reflected in the many long-time employees. Glengate is proud to have fifteen people who have brought one or many members of their own families to join the company.
There are approximately 150 to 170 staff during peak season and during the winter staff is working on new projects, winter pruning, snow plowing, maintaining pool water levels, designing and placing holiday décor and other work.
Glengate refuses to compromise on quality or fulfilling the vision of its clients, no matter how challenging the project. This has resulted in a large portfolio of projects for clients in New Canaan, Greenwich, Darien, Westport, Cos Cob, Bedford, Rye, and other locations across Connecticut and New York.
Some works, such as a recent project in the Westchester County suburb of Bronxville, New York require both spectacular landscape expertise and complex engineering. In a small backyard not large enough for a patio and pool, Glengate designed a pool with a floor much like a Broadway stage with an elevator platform that rises using specialized European engineering. When the floor is raised, it becomes a backyard patio; when the floor goes down, it disappears into the swimming pool itself, with water flowing into a half-inch space around all four perimeter sides, transforming it into a functional swimming pool.
To construct the pool in such a small backyard, construction went well below the depth of the foundation of the house, requiring that the footing around the entire rear of the house be underpinned before excavation could start. An additional challenge was the client’s severe allergies, so Glengate installed European water purification systems used to purify drinking water without chlorine. The system uses a combination of ozone, ultraviolet light, and diatomaceous earth instead.
“So we get called in for very specialized, engineered projects like that,” says Scott, “and we get called in to create beautiful outdoor living spaces for our clients, pools and gardens, kitchens and outdoor pool houses that are open-air outdoor entertainment living spaces. So our special projects really range from living and lifestyle-type projects to overcoming great engineering obstacles, such as with the pool floor.”
Glengate and its staff have earned praise from clients and numerous awards for outstanding design and installation work for four decades. Most recently, New England Home magazine awarded Glengate designer Cheryl Russ its prestigious ‘5 Under 40 Award’ that highlights the work of rising stars in the lifestyle design industry who are under forty years old. The magazine also previously acknowledged Glengate’s director of design Brandon Jones.
The 2018 Northeast Spa and Pool Association (NESPA) Outstanding Achievement Awards recognized the company in five award categories. Glengate’s awards included a Gold Medal for Exceptional Design and Building, Gold and Silver Medals in Negative Edge Pools, a Silver Medal in Safety Cover Installation, and a Merit Award for Indoor Pool Design.
And finally, Glengate received the Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD) Gold Award for Landscape Design, for a Rye residence designed by Cheryl Russ and Jim Altum. The project was called ‘a tremendous example of site planning and landscape design,’ by the APLD’s panel of judges and features beautiful views of the Long Island Sound and excellent use of local wetland plant life. Cheryl and Jim’s achievement will be recognized at the APLD’s international design conference in July.
The greatest award the company receives is knowing the positive difference it makes for clients. “We are a lifestyle brand, and we live that in the spaces we create,” says Scott. “So the spaces we create are beautiful lifestyle spaces for clients being able to enjoy the outdoors in their own special personal way.”
As one of the premier design-build companies of its kind in America, Glengate streamlines the entire process, giving clients not only a result they will enjoy for many years to come but also giving them something money cannot buy.
“You can buy swimming pools or diamonds or vacations or nice cars, but you can’t buy time,” says Scott. “And one of the things that’s frustrating to anyone going through a remodeling or building process is the amount of lost time and the homeowner feeling like they have to manage or micromanage. The best compliment we get is, ‘I never imagined something would be so easy, where my time is respected, and where we can trust you.’ And although things can go wrong in construction, we bring so much integrity to the process that clients don’t have to worry if something doesn’t go according to plan, because our team takes care of it. I think it has given people back the gift of their own time.”
