Frustrated with trying to grow grass in deep shade? Want to cut back the area consumed by your thirsty lawn? Looking to create an intimate space? Add a pathway winding through your sanctuary? Battling a drainage problem?
Hardscapes can provide relatively easy answers to a host of yard and garden difficulties.
“Patio and outdoor living spaces are an important trend in Colorado lifestyle because we can be outside so much of the year,” said Wendy Booth, a landscape architect with Ivy Street Design, a Denver firm.
Booth’s patio designs typically use non-mortared pavers of concrete or clay – which are fired bricks – or natural stone.
At Telluride Stone (telluridestone.com) at 3975 York St. in Denver, a showroom displays a wide variety of options, including pavers of various sizes, shapes and colors and 27 veneers for walls.
“Stone adds a lot of character,” said Heidi Tornare, general manager of the Denver
stone yard. “Natural stone makes your look unique; every piece you pick is definitely not like your neighbor’s.”
Sold by the ton or by the pound, the stones are square-cut blocks or smooth, river-washed cobblestones, capstones and boulders in a spectrum of hues.
“It’s important for people to know, especially in the Denver area, that there are other colors than red out there,” said Tornare. “Don’t stick with just red and buff. There’s a a nice rustic stone that’s brown and gold; there’s blue gray or charcoal or cream-colored stone.”
When shopping for stone for a patio or wall, Booth shares this advice: “It’s like clothes. You want to match neatly or to contrast effectively, but if it’s confusing, it looks messy,” she said.
“Both clay and brick can be tumbled, which gives pavers an antique look that’s very popular and very beautiful.”
Booth also uses concrete pavers, but warns that the ones stocked at home-improvement warehouses aren’t the most aesthetically appealing.
“The ones available to the public can look cheesy,” she said, “but a contractor has more options.”
But Tornare points out natural stone’s edge over concrete. “There are more options in color and character and customized or cuts. You don’t have to just buy what there is in manufactured material. We cut stone according to your design.”
Additionally, she says, stone’s character cannot be duplicated.
“You’re not going to get the perfect look. One corner is chipped there, or this edge is a little offset – that really adds to the character,” said Tornare.
Another popular hardscape option is a concrete slab. Concrete increasingly is colored and sometimes stamped to resemble natural stone, but unlike a patio of pavers with sand joints, the surface is nonpermeable.
“Concrete is common,” said Booth, “but less attractive from an environmental standpoint.”
Whichever material is selected, Booth emphasized that the next most important step is proper installation.
“Our climate is extremely hard on anything outside because of the repeated freeze-thaw cycles,” she said. “It can be 20 degrees in the morning and 70 in the afternoon. That means the earth moves, so the surface must be flexible.”
She recommends a layer of road base – a compacted gravel product – beneath sand used to fill the joints between stones or pavers.
“Road base makes the critical difference between a paver patio that lasts a long time and looks beautiful or a patio that looks wobbly and messy after a couple of years,” she said.
The gravel base also helps solve drainage problems, preventing water from pooling on a patio.
“Water percolates through, but pavers are sitting on a steady base,” said Booth. “I just looked at a clay-paver patio installed with road base in 1996, and it looked as good as if it were installed yesterday.”
