Paul Richards, a longtime West Chester resident, husband, father of three, and member of First Presbyterian Church, has turned his garage into an office, and his front yard into a working showroom for robotic mowers, as part of a broader effort he’s captured in a new book, The New American Lawn. 

If you live in the West Chester borough and have noticed a yard on Miner Street with a few small robots gliding silently across the grass, it’s probably his.  

Richards runs the Pennsylvania side of Zippy Lawnz out of his garage — a quiet street where the neighbors are fellow homeowners, parents, and churchgoers. They’re the same kind of people he’s hoping to reach with a simple idea: lawn care doesn’t have to be loud, smelly, or full of chemicals. 

Zippy Lawnz wasn’t his idea originally. The company was started by his father, Hugh Richards.  

The headquarters is in Easton, Maryland, where the official retail location and authorized service center for Mammotion, Navimow, and Yarbo robotic mowers. So, while his West Chester setup looks like a garage operation, it’s really the Pennsylvania front door of an established business with a full service center and retail location and most of his work is on the road doing on-site customer installations. 

During his past career, Richards spent time writing about technology. He spent years at a robotics company called PTZOptics, in Downingtown where he authored several books on broadcasting and live video.  

When he started looking at his own lawn the way he used to look at robotics in studios — as a problem worth solving with smart, quiet machines — it became clear there was a story to tell here.  

So he wrote one.  

The book is called The New American Lawn, and it’s about where we are as a society in how we care for the small green spaces that surround our homes, schools, and churches. 

Richards’ garage is now the office. The front yard is the showroom. On any given afternoon, you can stop by and see three different robotic mower platforms working a real residential lawn: the Mammotion Luba 2 and Luba 3, the Navimow X430 with its companion MowGate, and the smaller, frankly adorable Navimow i110 series, which starts at just $999. 

Each one runs on electricity, makes about as much noise as a refrigerator, and never needs a drop of gasoline. 

That last part matters more to Richards than the technology itself.  

He has three kids. He attends First Presbyterian Church here in West Chester. He wants their weekend mornings to sound like birds and conversation, not a chorus of two-stroke engines.  

Robotic mowers cut a tiny amount of grass every day instead of a large amount once a week, and those micro-clippings fall back into the lawn as natural fertilizer.  

That means less gas, less noise, and far less reliance on chemical treatments that nobody really wants on the ground their kids and pets play on. 

Richards didn’t set out to join a lawn care company. He joined one to help modernize what feels like one of the last corners of American suburbia that hasn’t really changed in 50 years.  

The fact that he gets to do it from a garage in the borough he loves, alongside neighbors he sees at the grocery store and on Sunday mornings — with his dad’s warehouse and service team an hour south backing it all up — is the part he didn’t expect, and the part he’s most grateful for. 

If you are interested in test driving one of the robotic lawn mowers, Richards is also open to setting up a free one-time mow for potential customers. 

Try one on your own lawn. 

Most afternoons, he’s out visiting customers around Chester County, bringing the robotic mowers with him so homeowners can take a test drive on their own grass before they decide anything.  

They handle the full installation, ongoing maintenance, and software updates so the switch is genuinely easy.  

They also help match the right mower to the right yard — hills, slopes, and odd-shaped lots all factor in — and for homeowners who’d rather not own one outright, they offer lawn service contracts priced about the same as traditional mowing, with quieter, cleaner, and more consistent results.  

The New American Lawn is available on Amazon, and free PDF copies are available to anyone who emails [email protected].  

Richards and his team is also accepting nominations for a local family or location that could use an outdoor lawn care makeover.  

If you know of someone, or would like to schedule an at-home test drive or a site visit, reach Paul Richards directly or learn more at ZippyLawnz.com or call/text 410-725-7500.