Landscape Structures Brand Guidelines: Continuous Play and Employee Ownership From Delano

A thesis idea, a garage and a warehouse.

Landscape Structures began as a landscape architect’s student idea. The company’s timeline places the start of “continuous play” in 1966, when Steve King was studying at Iowa State University, and its founders’ page says the concept came from his final thesis. The idea was to link slides, climbers, horizontal ladders and other play events into one connected structure. The company credits King as its originator and says he was the first to interconnect play events in this way.

He and his wife, Barb King, settled in the Twin Cities after college. The company says he worked as a landscape architect specialising in park planning for a consulting firm, while she tested recipes for cookbooks; the trade magazine LASN wrote in 2008 that she had been a home economist at Pillsbury. In 1969 he was assigned a playground project for the City of Minneapolis and, the company says, won over a sceptical project manager. Neighbours liked the structure, and people elsewhere in the city asked for one of their own.

The same year, the company says, he left his job and started a site-planning firm, King Associates, whose work was mostly not playgrounds until a townhouse client took a playstructure. LASN gave a different date, saying in 2008 that the couple quit their jobs in 1971 to start building playground equipment.

The move out of the garage is the company’s founding story. In early 1971, it says, the city told the Kings they would have to move the business. They found warehouse space and incorporated Landscape Structures, a name chosen to reflect the work more accurately. A profile in the trade directory Playground Professionals says the warehouse was in Golden Valley and that by 1975 a new facility had been built in Delano, west of Minneapolis, now the headquarters.

Steve King concentrated on product development, the company says, and Barb King on running the operation; she later served as president. The early years were lean, by its own account, until investors came in, and it dates its first profitable year to 1976. Its first sales representative, Jack Gleason of NuToys Leisure Products, signed on in 1974.

From timber to steel, polyethylene and cast concrete.

The company’s fact sheet says its original equipment was made of wood. The turning point came in 1984, when it bought Mexico Forge, a steel and aluminium play-structure maker. With that deal came PlayBooster, which the timeline describes as the first post-and-clamp play system; Playground Professionals says Landscape Structures stopped manufacturing with wood altogether at that point. Today the fact sheet lists steel, aluminium, polyethylene and cable as its main materials.

A material story followed in 1985. The company says an airport bathroom partition suggested that compression-moulded polyethylene could make activity panels, and so Permalene was born; it says the panels were first offered in recycled form in 2010. Other entries on its timeline, each described there as a first, include the VitaCourse fitness trail of 1977, the Mobius climber of 2005 and the gyroscopic Evos system of 2007. The newer ranges have a stronger geometric character: Hedra arrived in 2020 and the angular, asymmetrical Forma in 2023, and the company’s fact sheet says Hedra received a GOOD DESIGN Award from the Chicago Athenaeum.

Access has been a long thread. The company dates its first wheelchair transfer system to 1993, the year Steve King was appointed to the Federal Access Board’s Recreation Access Advisory Committee, on which it says he was the sole playground equipment manufacturer. King was also a founding member of the International Play Equipment Manufacturers Association in 1995. The company’s We-Go-Swing was recognised with a Minnesota Manufacturing Award from the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, which its timeline dates to 2021 and its fact sheet to 2022.

Much of the visual character comes from the factory. The company says its in-house concrete plant, opened in 2011, is the only one in the playground industry, and that its artists and sculptors use glass fibre reinforced concrete to make rocks, trees, foxes, spaceships and dragons. It also describes a 1,400-foot powder paint line in 39,000 square feet of coating space. Colour is sold as part of the brand: the website has its own colour inspiration and palette pages, and the company says its “Color Inspirations” advertisement won a Landscape Architecture Magazine LAMMY in 2015, a year it also joined that magazine’s advertising hall of fame. Another LAMMY, for an Aquatix advertisement, followed in 2024.

Parks, catalogues and the people who install them.

Playground equipment is sold to people who will never climb on it: parks departments, school boards, housing associations and landscape architects. The makers’ brochures speak to those buyers. Their catalogues tend to lead with an installed site rather than a single object, often a town square, a schoolyard or a housing estate with the equipment in use and the setting in view.

The visual language comes largely from the materials. Steel frames and posts arrive powder-coated in strong primary colours, set against panels in black, sand or a muted green. Timber ranges, in species such as robinia and larch, read differently: greyer and more irregular, closer to the trees around them. Rope nets add a third texture, and rubber surfacing, poured or laid beneath the equipment, adds a field of colour that can run across a whole site.

Geography is part of the presentation too. Several makers come from small towns rather than capitals, and a Nordic catalogue image can be a park in a modest town under low light, with the equipment as the brightest thing in view. Others present a works, a family name or a date on a timeline.

Installers are part of the product too: this equipment reaches its users only after a crew has dug footings, fixed posts and laid the surface. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it now, where it says its products are made, and which of those statements rest on the company’s word alone.

Owned by the people who build it.

Ownership is the most distinctive part of the company’s story. Its Employee Stock Ownership Plan began in 2004, and the company says it became 100 percent employee-owned in 2012. LASN reported in March 2008 that it had been employee-owned since 2004 and employed 325 people, and the directory Certified EO, citing Department of Labor filings and other third-party data, lists it as an ESOP company since 2004. The company’s history brochure calls it one of the few remaining independently owned businesses in the playground industry.

Leadership has passed to long-serving managers. Pat Faust, who joined in 1996, was named president in 2008. In June 2025 Landscape Structures announced that Karlye Emerson, part of its leadership team since 2001, had been promoted to president and CEO, succeeding him on his retirement, as Recreation Management also reported. Steve King published a company history, A Legacy of Play, in 2013.

The business has widened beyond playstructures through acquisitions. In 2012 it bought Pebblesoft Technologies, which led to its PebbleFlex surfacing. In October 2015 Aquatics International reported that it had acquired Aquatic Recreation Company and its sister firm Commercial Aquatic Engineering, based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a move into water and splash play now sold as Aquatix. In 2016 it launched SkyWays in Dallas, Texas, to make shade products.

On where things are made, the company says it performs all its design, engineering and manufacturing in-house, in nearly 600,000 square feet of manufacturing and distribution space in Delano and Dallas, though its brochure gives more than 600,000. Its fact sheet says more than 700 people work there and that it has designed, made and installed more than 80,000 playgrounds worldwide; the brochure gives more than 500 employees. Sales run through more than 50 independent representative organisations. It names ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 among its certifications, and says it was named to the Forbes Accessibility 100 in 2025 and to the Accessibility 200 in 2026.

For a design guide, Landscape Structures shows how one founding idea and an unusual ownership model can carry a brand for more than 50 years. Compare Playworld, the Pennsylvania maker that PlayPower bought in 2016, and KOMPAN of Denmark. For this guide we use spruce, ochre and pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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