Multi-level, if the ground is already telling you to
A great many properties around here slope. The instinct is to fight it — cut and fill until there is one large flat area — and the better answer is usually to work with it: two or three smaller terraces at different levels, connected by steps, each doing a different job.
It costs less than one enormous level because you move less earth, it needs shorter retaining walls, and it produces a space that feels like rooms rather than a slab. A dining terrace close to the house, a lower seating level around a fire, and a bit of planting between them is a far more usable arrangement than the same square footage all at one height.
A fire feature, positioned for the wind rather than the photograph
The most common mistake with a fire pit is siting it where it looks good on a plan instead of where the smoke will not sit on the seating. Prevailing wind here is generally out of the west and northwest in the colder months, which is when a fire pit gets used. Put the seating upwind, or accept that half of it will be empty.
Gas or wood is a genuine choice rather than a false one. Gas lights instantly, produces no smoke and no ash, and needs a line run and sleeved before the patio base goes down — retrofitting it means cutting up a finished patio. Wood costs nothing to run and is the thing most people actually want; it just needs somewhere for the wood and somewhere for the ash.
An outdoor kitchen, with the utilities in first
The part that gets missed is not the grill, it is everything behind it. Gas, electric for lighting and outlets, and — if there is a sink — water and a drain that can be winterised, because a charged line left through a Hudson Valley January splits.
All of that has to be roughed in before the base goes down. Built as masonry with a block or steel core, veneered to match the patio, with a counter material that will take a freeze. Built well it is a twenty-year structure; built as a kit on a slab it is a five-year one.
Things that make a patio unusable, all of them avoidable
In rough order of how often we are asked to fix them:
- No shade. A south or west-facing terrace with nothing over it is unusable from noon until four in July. A pergola, a sail or a tree solves it and is much cheaper designed in than added later.
- Wrong pitch. A patio that falls toward the house sends water at the foundation for as long as it exists. It should fall about an eighth of an inch per foot away.
- No lighting. An outdoor space with no light is an outdoor space that stops existing at seven in the evening for half the year. Low-voltage runs are cheap and want to go in before the surface does.
- Too far from the door. The terrace people actually use is the one they can step onto carrying two plates. A beautiful space at the bottom of the garden gets used four times a summer.
- Too small. A dining table with chairs pulled out needs about twelve feet in each direction. A patio sized to the table and not to the chairs is a patio people shuffle around.
And one that is specific to here
Deer. Northern Westchester and Putnam carry heavy deer pressure, and a newly planted border of hostas, arborvitae or yews around a new patio is a feeding station. It is entirely possible to plant beautifully here — it just has to be planned around from the start rather than defended afterwards.