Patio Designs

Patio Designs


When contemplating your backyard deck or patio design, you will consider which material to use, shape and size of the deck or patio, and best way to transition off the deck or patio (into the house, or onto the rest of the backyard). For our purposed here, let's agree that patios are made of bricks, stone or cement, while decks are made of wood or simulated wood products.

Patios can be attached to a house or detached. They are often designed and oriented with the landscape in mind. Patios are versatile: they can take on any shape and be built with a variety of materials, including concrete, pavers, stone, tile, brick, pebbles, rocks or gravel. Most patios are set on a concrete slab or a sand and pebble base. Once you've decided to build a patio instead of a deck and have chosen a site, there are other design considerations:


A simple design plan to make laying brick patios easy for do-it-yourselfers. This brick patio design is easy to build yet elegant, laying the bricks in a striking pattern that requires no cutting!

After 7 years of watching our wood deck look like crap (despite constant staining) due to the SouthWest exposure to the Colorado sun (and dry climate), I finally replaced it with stamped concrete. Being the analytical type of person I am, I fiddled with various deck designs, trying to determine what would be best. One early idea was having a patio design with a permanent shade structure, but that would have cost $30k (or more!) ... so my frugal wife decided a pair of outdoor umbrellas would suffice. These provide adjustable shade as the Sun moves across the sky, and has worked out much better than the shade trees we planted in 2002.


Are you using it for family dining? Will you be entertaining quite a bit?

Would you like some areas for relaxing in your backyard with some nice lounge chairs? These answers will help determine your patio size.

We used dry laid, patterned bluestone for this lovely patio. The bluestone color is "full range", which looks great on many patio designs.