Outdoor Patio Design

Why do people build patios in the first place?
Outdoor patio design is motivated by two things: function and artistry. People hire professional landscaping companies to build patios in order to host events and support activities that pertain to Houston outdoor living. They also want these patios to contribute a sense of artistry and design to the property as a whole. They want beauty added to the organic elements of their yards beyond the simple level of lawn and garden forms.

What function do play in the landscape?
The functionality of outdoor patio design is always predicated on the activities that will be transpiring on that patio. People use a patio either for sitting or standing. Designers use the patio as a foundation element. Many landscaping styles require integrating softscape with hardscape elements. It is important to strike a sense of balance between utility and aesthetics in order to preserve the sense of unity between divergent, albeit complimentary, landscape forms.

How many patios should the average home have?
There is no way to determine this without looking at the home, the yard, and the lifestyle of the owners. Patios are normally built around areas of interest where people will be gathering. Some are built to host special occasion events. Others are intended to be private areas used only by the homeowners themselves. The shape and size of a patio depends greatly on surrounding aesthetics. Home architecture and landscape design themes must be complimented by the materials used and the geometry of the patio itself. There are a number of examples of how Exterior Worlds uses surrounding architecture and landscape aesthetics in our case histories section, which you can visit here.

Where do we build patios?
Considering how activity and aesthetics are really the heart and soul of outdoor patio design, there are few places where a patio cannot be built. The one exception to this is any area adjacent to the home itself. We do everything we can to avoid linking a vertical wall of a house to the horizontal plane of a patio. It simply does not serve the aesthetics of either architecture or residential landscape design to create perpendicular inorganic structures of this nature. It is too much for the eye to bear.

Instead, we always look to surround an outdoor patio design with greenery or ornamentation of some sort. Even in entry gardens which lie to the side of a home in the space between the house and the property line, we build custom fountains, install planters with flowers, or create linear gardens. This creates the sense that the patio, no matter how large its size, is surrounded by an organic presence.

This is very important to preserving the beauty of a yard. Since hardscapes can take up to 80% of the landscape in many yards, surrounding an outdoor patio with even a little bit of vegetation creates the sense that Nature is always present, alive, and well in the inorganic world of human structures.

What materials are used to build patios?
Many people think that high-end landscape design would only be done with special stonework. This is not necessarily true. Concrete can be a very cost-effective and highly aesthetic material for outdoor patio design. This is because there are so many ways to make something as plane as concrete look highly decorative. (Please remember too that the Romans invented concrete and many of the famous ruins that people visit to this day are not built from stone, but rather from concrete.)

Brushing and staining concrete add texture and color to its surface. Proprietary masonry techniques can also be used by landscape architects to create blocks of concrete that look identical to stones. The effect is the same, but the cost is significantly less.

For people who do want to invest in stone patio design, the colors and sizes of stone must be selected based upon the garden design that surrounds the area and the color and style of the house that preeminently rises up from the landscape. Two of the more popular stones used are limestone and flagstone, although there are an infinite variety of more unique and even obscure stone types that can be used at will to build any custom patio necessary for a design element or special occasion.

How to patios contribute to outdoor landscape aesthetics?
Outdoor patio design is important to every form of landscaping. Because hardscapes take up to 80% of a yard in some landscape master plans, it is essential to build structures that will harmonize with softscape elements rather than overwhelming them. Patios are ideal for this because they are built as horizontal planes even or parallel to the ground itself.

This implies a structural design that engages Nature on the level of equivalence rather than from a position of dominance. With such a structure we can do many things to introduce manmade elements into a landscape design that will provide all sorts of human creature comforts and simultaneously work to differentiate organic points of interests as unique areas of natural beauty. Careful positioning of patios helps draw attention to special plantings of trees and flowers, garden design, lawn elements and hedgerows.