Contractors across North America build tens of thousands of outdoor spaces with Unilock products every year. The Unilock Award of Excellence recognizes the small fraction that stand apart. Epic Interlock & Landscape is Unilock’s 2025 Ontario regional winner for Best Transformation.
The rubric behind that result is worth understanding, because it describes fairly precisely what separates a well-built hardscape from a merely finished one, and what a homeowner is really buying when they choose one contractor over another for a high-end build.
What Is the Unilock Award of Excellence?
Unilock introduced the original paving stone to North America in 1972 and has set the manufacturing benchmark for the hardscape industry since. The Awards of Excellence program is its annual recognition of the best installations built with its products.
The program is judged regionally. Ontario is one of nine Unilock regions across North America, each awarding its own category winners across front entrances, interlock driveways and patios, outdoor living spaces, projects under 1,000 square feet, and transformations. Regional winners then compete for the Featured Project Award, given to the single strongest project on the continent.
Entry is restricted in ways that matter. Submissions must be residential design and build projects completed by the entering company, so a contractor cannot enter work installed to another firm’s drawings, and each project must be at least 80 percent Unilock material.
How Winners Are Selected
Unilock judges every entry against six published criteria:
- Complexity. The degree of difficulty in the installation.
- Creativity. How original and practical the design is.
- Quality of workmanship. Accuracy of layout, levelling, cutting, and straightness of line.
- Choice of materials. How colour and texture relate to the home’s architecture.
- Overall appearance. The impression the finished project makes.
- Use of Unilock products. Whether the project draws on a genuine range of them.
Complexity is on that list. Cost is not. A modest project on a difficult site can outscore an expensive one on an easy one.
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Contact Us TodayWhat a Transformation Category Measures
Most categories judge a finished space on its own terms. A transformation category judges distance travelled, where the complexity criterion carries the most weight.
A property with good bones that finishes beautifully is a good project. One that began with poor grading, failed drainage, awkward elevation changes, and no usable outdoor space, and finished as a fully resolved outdoor room, whether centred on an inground pool and surround or a single-level terrace, represents a harder problem solved. Judging the change rather than the end state credits the part of the work no homeowner ever sees and no photograph can show.
H2: Why Workmanship Is the Hardest Criterion to Fake
Unilock’s own photography guidance gives the game away. Entrants are told to choose an angle that enhances the paver pattern and joints, which is to say photograph the exact detail that would expose a poor installation. That detail is what the workmanship criterion measures: accuracy of layout, levelling, cutting, and straightness of line.
Those lines are the visible record of what happened below grade, where excavation depth, base compaction, slope, and jointing decide whether a surface holds through Ontario’s freeze and thaw or starts moving in its second winter.
That is the real risk in a premium project, and it is a hidden one. The stone and the design are what a homeowner sees and pays for, and they look identical on day one whether the base beneath them was built properly or not. The difference only surfaces years later, when one patio is still dead level and another has begun to heave. By then the choice of contractor is long past changing. An award judged strongest in the province on exactly these measures is one of the few signals available at the outset that the part nobody sees was done right.
How to Read a Contractor’s Credentials
Third-party recognition is useful as a filter, and each kind verifies something different. Manufacturer authorization confirms a company meets Unilock’s installation standards. Independent certification, offered by the Concrete Masonry and Hardscapes Association, tests an installer against industry-wide criteria. A regional award confirms one completed project was judged strongest in its class across the province.
None of the three replaces reviewing a portfolio and speaking with past clients, though together they narrow the field. Epic holds Unilock Authorized Contractor status and now a 2025 Ontario category award, a meaningful shortlist to be on before the first conversation even starts. Our hardscape project gallery shows the work behind it.
Plan Your Own Transformation
Epic Interlock & Landscape has been building outdoor spaces across Pickering, Oshawa, Whitby, and the Eastern GTA since 2001, to the same standard on every project whether it is entered for an award or not. A high-end transformation is a significant investment, and the difference between one that lasts and one that disappoints is decided long before the final stone is placed. Choosing the contractor who has already been measured against that standard, and found strongest in the province, is the surest way to take that risk off the table.
If your property has the potential for a transformation of its own, we would be glad to walk it with you.
Contact us today to start the conversation.
