Waterfront & Shoreline Retaining Walls in Lakestone (Lake Country), BC

A master-planned community built on graded slope

Lakestone was master-planned in tiers, with roads and building pads cut into a hillside that drops toward Wood Lake and Kalamalka Lake below. That grading leaves most homeowners with a slope somewhere on their property, often right where they want their best outdoor living space: the tier closest to the view. A retaining wall here isn’t decorative — it’s what turns a sloped, unusable side yard into a level patio, pool deck, or lawn, and it’s what keeps engineered fill and topsoil from migrating downhill toward a neighbor’s lot or the shoreline corridor below.

Because Lakestone sits on a bench system rather than flat ground, walls also have to account for how water moves after Okanagan winter freeze-thaw and spring runoff. Drainage behind the wall matters as much as the wall itself: a wall that traps water instead of shedding it will heave, bow, or lean within a few seasons, especially on the steeper upper tiers where clay and rock outcrop can trap moisture against the back face. We design drainage into every wall — free-draining backfill, perforated drain tile tied to daylight or a storm connection, and geogrid reinforcement sized to the actual soil report for the lot, not a generic assumption — so the wall performs through its first decade, not just its first season.

Lakestone’s community architectural guidelines and the District of Lake Country both have a say in wall height, setbacks, and finish on view-facing lots, and lots closer to the water add a second layer of oversight tied to the shoreline itself. We design and permit these walls to satisfy the neighborhood’s standards as well as the slope, coordinating engineering, grading, and finish material so a Lakestone wall reads as part of the architecture — matched stone or a complementary tone to the home — rather than a raw engineered structure bolted onto the hillside afterward.

Height matters too. A single retaining wall over roughly one metre generally needs an engineer’s stamp in Lake Country, and Lakestone’s steeper tiers often call for two or more shorter, terraced walls rather than one tall one — both to stay under that threshold where it makes sense and to break a slope into usable planting benches instead of one sheer drop. That terraced approach also tends to fit the neighborhood’s look better than a single monolithic wall, giving room for planting pockets between tiers that soften the transition from house to hillside to water.

Because Lakestone’s tiered lots sit above Wood Lake and Kalamalka Lake, some retaining wall projects near the shoreline corridor also require foreshore approval before work can start. See our guide to foreshore and shoreline permits for what that process involves and how early it needs to begin relative to construction. For the full range of what we build on sloped and waterfront lots, including engineering, drainage, and materials, visit our Waterfront & Shoreline Retaining Walls service page, and for more on the neighborhood itself — its layout, lake access, and overall character — see our Lakestone (Lake Country) location page.