The other day I was headed down I75 thru Ohio on some business trip and off to the west I saw an abandoned building that looked totally covered in very thick trees. I wish I had stopped to take a photo. It turned out to be an abandoned Carrabba’s restaurant. I had seen this chain of restaurants before, but this one was so overgrown it really looked like a fully earth sheltered building.
Article explaining how it was done, click to read
I just did a little research and discovered that this was first done in Orlando Florida back in 1998… You really need to be interesting to stand out in Orlando, so the owners wanted the restaurant to remind patrons of the hills of Tuscany… They hired Architect James Wines, famous for incorporating landscaping into architecture, to figure it out for them. He created a large 1700 sqft “L” shaped planter design capable of supporting all the weight required, including 180,000 lbs of light weight soil, 12ft above the patio. It has ingenious design features such as drainage down thru the columns, a drip watering system and even boulders made of cellular concrete (aircrete). Since then, every Carrabba’s restaurant has followed this design, and 70 older restaurants were “greened”. There are now well over 100 green roofed Carribba’s restaurants in the USA and Canada, and I found that some even hold special “roof park picnics” on the roof from time to time. The large planter added about $50,000 to the cost of each restaurant. Due to the cost, Carrabba’s has stopped requiring the roof top gardens on its restaurants since 2006.
Gardeners are needed on the roof about 4 times a year
While they are going for a Tuscan look, and all the restaurants include Italian cypress trees, they are also planted with low-maintenance indigenous plants (such as palm trees Texas or Florida, or pines in Boston or Salt Lake). Lessons learned include cutting out aggressive plants such as bougainvillea that required more maintenance to keep them from overpowering the other plants. Carribba’s is looking for a natural look, so gardeners only go up on the roof 4 times a year. The gardens must be very robust because even the abandoned restaurant I saw was doing very well all on its own.
Small birds, butterflies and even geese are a common sight on many of Carrabba’s rooftops. It is as if they found a small oasis in the desert of parking lots.
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- Article explaining how it was done, click to read
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- Gardeners are needed on the roof about 4 times a year
