LANDSCAPE ONTARIO
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Ron Koudys Landscape Architects, London, Ont.
LUCKY TO LOVE
LANDSCAPES By Jordan Whitehouse
W
hen you’ve been in business for almost 40 years, you’ve likely had to surmount a few major challenges. That is, unless you’re Ron Koudys, the man behind London, Ontario’s Ron Koudys Landscape Architects. “People talk about life having challenges, but I’ve never had that same sense of something to overcome,” Koudys says. “I love what I do. I get up in the morning, every morning, and I think wow, what a lucky guy I am.” Anyone who knows Koudys, though, knows that his success has little to do with luck. What started as a business out of a small office in his London home in 1981, has grown into one of the most renowned landscape architectural firms in the area. It’s now located in a downtown London building with 10 employees — including three arborists and six landscape architects — one of whom is Ron’s son, Luke. In the early days of the business, Koudys says the average construction value per project was between $5,000 and $10,000. Now it’s $100,000 and up, with some in the multi-million-dollar range. About 90 per cent of those projects are now in corporate/commercial, and they run the gamut from municipal parks to seniors’ centres,
Loblaws stores to shopping centres, university campuses to hospitals. So if luck hasn’t been the secret to all of that success, what has?
An early start
It certainly helped that Koudys seems to have landscaping and horticulture in his blood. In the early 1950s, his grandfather emigrated to the Niagara region from Boskoop, Holland — the epicentre of horticulture in the country — and started a landscaping business. Ron’s dad and uncle were also involved in the business, and by the time he was nine, Ron too, was pushing a lawnmower and spending all of his weekends, evenings, and summers working with his grandfather. When Koudys was 13, his family moved to a farm between Fort Erie and Niagara Falls where he started a small nursery with his dad. By the end of high school, Koudys was also working at Hasselman Nurseries in Fort Erie, doing propagation and field work. A year later, he enrolled in the University of Guelph’s landscape architecture program. Koudys had written the administrators of that program when he was in grade eight, a year after the program launched, because
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