Peachland Hillside Terracing: A multi-tier retaining wall build

The Brief

Peachland’s hillsides above Okanagan Lake offer some of the best views in the valley, but they come with a tradeoff: many lots drop away from the house at a grade that’s tough to walk on, let alone landscape. This property was one of those — a steep, largely unusable slope between the home and the lower yard, with topsoil visibly migrating downhill after every heavy rain. The homeowners wanted the hillside turned into something they could actually stand on and enjoy, not just look at from the deck above.

The Approach

On grades like this, a single tall wall is rarely the right answer — it concentrates enormous soil and hydrostatic pressure behind one structure and can be visually overwhelming from below. Our design instead broke the slope into a series of stepped tiers, each wall doing a smaller, more manageable share of the retaining work. This is a technique we come back to often in the Peachland-Westbank corridor, where lakefront-adjacent properties routinely combine steep grades with clay-heavy soils that hold water and add load behind a wall if drainage isn’t engineered in from the start. Terracing also opens up something a single retaining wall can’t: usable flat ground at multiple levels, so the yard gains function at every tier instead of just at the bottom.

What We Built

Each tier was built on a compacted granular base with proper reinforcement and backfill, engineered drainage behind every course to relieve hydrostatic pressure, and a segmental retaining wall block system chosen to match the site’s proportions and the home’s exterior materials. The tiers step down the slope in a consistent rhythm, with the flat ground at each level planted or finished for actual use rather than left as a runoff channel. The result reads as one coherent hillside from the street, but functions as a series of stable, walkable terraces the family can now move through instead of around.

Have a sloped lot of your own? Explore our Retaining Walls service, including our approach to hillside terracing, or see how we work with properties throughout the Peachland area. You can also browse more completed projects on our project gallery.