The Lawrence Residence

Scope of Project:

While this client of ours already had a beautiful deck and covered patio that they used for dining purposes, what was clearly lacking was appropriate space for relaxing and other forms of outdoor entertaining on their beautiful estate. The starting point for the design process was to find an appropriate location for a desired fire pit patio. Due to the slope of the backyard, and the fact that there was no further space on their upper section of yard for such a feature, we elected to choose a spot on the lower level which was in line with their primary view corridor, as viewed from their dining patio. Doing so would add further interest to an already beautiful view from that location.

Having settled on that, we needed to create a functional yet gorgeous way to connect their upper patio with their proposed fire pit patio. Our client happened to have a beautiful old juniper tree in their back yard, which we chose to highlight by making the tree the center of radius for an elegant system of steps leading from the upper patio down to the new fire pit patio. We chose sand finish concrete for the that part of the project, both for its raw beauty and it’s slip resistance.

We enclosed the stamped concrete fire pit patio with an 18” seat wall that we faced with stucco to match our client’s house, and capped the wall with fossilized sandstone. Subtle lighting was hidden under the wall caps. For the fire pit we ordered a custom-made pit from Concrete Creations, and finished off the patio with a Polaris octagon patio umbrella from ShademakerUSA. An automatic irrigation and drainage system was installed for the flower pots, and a putting green surrounding the patio was added to give further elegance to the location.

For the hot tub we chose a model from Bullfrog, due to their great reputation for building spas designed for cold climate locations. We surrounded the partially sunken hot tub with Timbertech decking and enclosed the space with lighted glass railings from Regan Ideas.

To soften all the hardscape features, our choice of deer resistant plant material for this project included Morning Light Miscanthus, Isanti Dogwood, Blue Avena Grass, Caesar’s Brother Siberian Iris, and one of our most favorite perennials Takara Peony, which is cross between an herbaceous Peony and a Chinese Tree Peony.