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Continue readingHow To Choose Paving For Your Patio or Driveway
Where Is The Best Place To Position Your Patio
The best position for a patio usually seems obvious – back of the house, outside the
patio or bi-fold doors, but is that always the best spot for it?
We’ve teamed up with The Paving Expert, Tony McCormack, to find out.
It can be difficult to choose where exactly to position a patio. You need to consider the size of your garden, patio furniture, current trends and intended uses before you make your decision. The Paving Expert, Tony McCormack discusses below how to reach these decisions so that you can enjoy your patio for many years to come. Tony McCormack is a highly knowledgable paving consultant and offers lots of excellent resources on his website.
Space to Entertain
For entertaining purposes, having easy access to the house, and especially the kitchen,
is a priority. No-one wants to walk further than necessary to bring out the forgotten
mayonnaise or another bottle of wine, but that doesn’t always mean the main patio
area has to directly outside the rear doors.
A “Landing Area” Patio Position
There’s no doubt a ‘landing area’ outside such access points is incredibly useful, but
does such an area need to be the main patio? On north-facing gardens, the house will
usually shade the area directly outside the rear doors, so it may not be the best place
for the perfect patio. It might be a better plan to have smaller area directly outside
the entrance doors, somewhere to remove muddy shoes, position the doormat, or
store the hosepipe, keep the bins, or park those items that are better out than in. This
then gives the opportunity to create a more expansive and family-oriented patio
elsewhere in the garden, even if it’s just a few metres away.
For those enjoying an after-work chill-out, think about where the late afternoon or
evening sun lingers longest, allowing you to bask in the embers of the day’s warmth.
Alternatively, if you’re more of a morning person, where’s the best spot to catch
those first chill-banishing rays?
Eavesdropping Neighbours
Bear in mind however, proximity to neighbouring properties. No-one wants to be in
a spot where you’re too easily overheard by those-next-door, or, vice-versa – to be an
involuntary eavesdropper on their domestic details. If you have the space, keep a
patio away from boundary fences, or, in less roomy plots, think about using a dense
hedge to absorb and muffle the sound in either direction.
Consider Privacy
And consider also a degree of privacy within the garden. If you have a young family,
it may be advantageous to be able to see as much of the garden as possible, or at least
the main playing area, but more mature homeowners often prefer a secluded nook,
where they can sit and snooze, do the crossword, or enjoy a cheeky snifter without
being on show to all and sundry.
Garden Features
A patio should be something attractive to look upon, so think about the positional
relationship to flower beds, water features, shrubberies and rockeries. Sometimes, it’s
easier to move or position such features to suit the patio, rather than squeeze the
patio into a less-than-ideal spot just to be able to see the pond.
Paths and Lines
Patios that are separated from the main house need connecting paths, but do they
really need to be straight lines? A sinuous route is often more visually appealing but
probably only a couple of metres longer when measured-up. Or would stepping
stones be better suited? If so, think carefully about the spacing between each of the
‘stones’.
Your Patio is for You
So: don’t just settle for a simple rectangle centred on the patio doors or spanning the
bi-folds. Spend time thinking about how you want to use the patio. Is it simply a
seating area or something more? Does it make the most of the sun, or provide a
refuge of dappled shade for the hottest part of the day? Do you want a secluded
nook for two or an expansive platform for family and entertaining and fun?
There are no set rules for where to position a patio. It doesn’t have to be this or that or the other. It’s
your space. Have it your way and let it reflect your tastes, your style, your own
personality….and you’ll love it all the more.
To read about how to decide on a size and shape for your patio, read our previous blog here.
This article “Where Is The Best Place To Position Your Patio” was written by The Paving Expert, Tony McCormack, in conjunction with Joint-It.
Joint-It are a leading manufacturer of professional jointing and stone care products. The patio grout used in the photos of this article is Joint-It Simple: https://jointit.com/products/joint-it-simple/
How to Choose a Size and Shape For Your Patio
We’ve teamed up with The Paving Expert, Tony McCormack, to discuss how to choose a size and shape for your patio.
It can be difficult to choose a size and shape for your patio. You need to consider the size of your garden, patio furniture, current trends and intended uses before you make your decision. The Paving Expert, Tony McCormack discusses below how to reach these decisions so that you can enjoy your patio for many years to come. Tony McCormack is a highly knowledgable paving consultant and offers lots of excellent resources on his website https://www.pavingexpert.com/.
Does a patio always have to be square or rectangular?
There’s an assumption that a patio shape has to be a simple square or rectangle of paving directly outside the rear doors. The problem is that this rarely works effectively. All too often it’s too small to be of any practical use. At the other extreme, it completely dominates the garden. This can leave you with seemingly acres of paved empty space and a few items of over-priced outdoor furniture scattered at random. There usually is an optimal size for a patio, but it’s not something that follows a mathematical rule. It’s based on how the patio will be used, combined with the preferred style of those users.
How to Choose a Size for your Patio
At a basic level, there should be room to accommodate a table. Is that a bistro-style table for two, or a party-central expanse that wouldn’t be out of place in a pub beer garden? Maybe you’ll have different needs at different times. Perhaps a cosy corner spot for an early-morning breakfast. Or a family-and-friends spread for those summer weekend evenings. Take time to decide what you will use your patio for, as this will help to determine the size of your patio.
Patio Furniture Measurements
So, you need room for a table, but a table also needs chairs. The typical 1.8m dimension for a patio table, suddenly needs another 450mm or so for a chair. However, we’re not done yet. That needs to be +900mm because you’ll want chairs at both sides of the table. We’re up at 2.7m now. And then there’s nothing more annoying than trying to squeeze past a fully-seated table, or pushing out the chair to get up for another beer, and it ends up in the flower bed or sinking its legs into the lawn.
You need manoeuvring space, probably 500-600mm to ensure there’s not too much of an invasion of personal space. Add that 600mm to each side of the table, that’s another 1.2m and now we’re at 3.9m. All that for a 1.8m width table! To be fair, for a table of that size, it is perfectly possible to get by with 3.6m, but that’s about as tight as you’d want to go. Four metres is ample and comfortable.
If that’s too big a space to give over to hard-landscaping, then maybe choose a smaller table. It’s surprising how practical a simple 1.2m width table can be. However, the size of the patio needs to suit the scale of the garden. A 4m patio is fantastic, but if the garden is only, say, 7m wide, is it right to use more than half of it for paving? Alternatively, if there’s an acre or more, then 4m might seem a little mean-spirited.
Top Tip
It’s rarely a good idea to cover more than half the garden space available with hard surfaces. While some designs do precisely that and look fantastic, there needs to be a balance between the paving and the greenery; the hardscape and the softscape. The way the patio is to be used, and the space available, will determine what size works best.
How to Choose a Shape for your Patio
Simple rectangles work better in small plots and/or with strong geometric designs. Neat edges, crisp definition, straight lines are powerful features and are probably best used with caution. For larger areas, and particularly for those looking at a more traditional garden style, the patio offers the opportunity to create a subconscious transition from the strict orthogonal geometry of the house to the more organic, softer features of the garden itself.
A patio against the house will most likely have a straight, regimented line where it abuts the brickwork. There can also be a sinuous, curved or sculpted edge where it meets the lawn or the flower beds. A dog-legged or staggered step edge can also provide that less formal, gentler changeover. Free-standing patios, those not abutting the house or any other straight, rigid feature such as a boundary wall or fence, may take on a wholly organic shape, or perhaps a more sympathetic geometric shape, such as a circle or ellipse.
A strict, geometric square or rectangle can bring an element of formality, if so desired. With triangles…well, no installer will thank you for choosing a triangular shape. While they can seem highly appealing when sketched on a designer’s pad, it’s incredibly awkward to make them look right on the ground, and there’s a lot of tricky cutting!
Finally, give some thought to those edges where the garden meets the paving. Will that be a clipped and trimmed lawn edge? Would it benefit from an edging to give it upstand? If it’s a flower bed, plants will most likely spill over and soften the edge even more. Areas of loose cover, such as gravel or shingle or bark, abutting the patio may benefit from some form of retainer to keep the unruly stones in place on off the hard paving.
Final Thoughts
A patio offers so much for a garden, and it has very few design limitations. The tips above should guide you towards choosing a size and shape for your patio that suits your needs. Your patio needs to be stylish and it needs to be functional, but beyond that, the only limits are the space available and your imagination.
This article “How to Choose a Size and Shape for your Patio” was written by Tony McCormack in conjunction with Joint-It.
Joint-It are a leading manufacturer of professional jointing and stone care products. The patio grout used in the photos of this article is Joint-It Simple: https://jointit.com/products/joint-it-simple/
Joint-It are a leading manufacturer of professional jointing and stone care products. The patio grout used in the photos of this article is Joint-It Simple: https://jointit.com/products/joint-it-simple/