Application · Charlotte NC

Outdoor Living Areas

Kitchens, fire features and covered rooms built on a slab

In detail

Planning outdoor living areas

Everything heavy needs to be decided before the pour

An outdoor kitchen island, a masonry fire feature, a pergola post and a hot tub are all point loads, and all of them need to be known before concrete goes down. A hot tub full of water and people is roughly five thousand pounds concentrated on a small footprint. A pergola post takes uplift as well as compression. These want thickened sections or footings under them, poured monolithically with the slab. Adding them later means cutting a decorative surface you have just paid for.

Conduit, gas and drains you cannot add afterwards

Gas to a grill, power to an island, a water line to a sink, a drain from it, low-voltage for lighting, and a sleeve for anything you have not thought of yet — all of it is cheap before the pour and disruptive after. We sleeve generously as a matter of course, because an empty conduit costs a few dollars and a saw cut across a finished stamped slab costs a great deal more than that in both money and appearance.

Fire features and thermal movement

Concrete directly under a fire pit takes repeated heating and cooling in a small area, and coloured or sealed concrete shows that as discolouration long before it shows as damage. The straightforward answer is a hearth of a different material — stone, brick or a fire-rated pad — set into the slab, which also gives the fire feature a visual base. Where a client wants the concrete to run continuously under a fire feature, we say plainly that the surface will change colour there.

Making the transitions read as intentional

An outdoor living area usually meets several other materials: house brick, a stone veneer island, a wooden deck, planting beds, the pool coping. Decorative concrete looks best when it stops at a deliberate line — a saw-cut border, a colour change, a banding of a different finish — rather than dying into whatever it happens to meet. Deciding those lines is design work and it happens on paper before it happens in concrete.

Covered versus uncovered, and what it changes

A covered outdoor room stays dry, so the finish options widen considerably: smoother surfaces become acceptable, acid stain keeps its variation instead of weathering flat, and the sealer lasts far longer out of ultraviolet light. It also means the concrete cures in shade, which slows it down and changes the timing of stamping and cutting. Both matter and neither is obvious from a brochure.

Finishes to consider

Stamped Concrete Stained Concrete Exposed Aggregate Polished Concrete Decorative Overlays Saw-Cut Designs Colored Concrete

Other applications

Five other surfaces

Patios

The largest decorative surface most houses will ever have

Pool Decks

Wet, barefoot, and in full sun — the hardest surface to specify

Walkways & Entries

The first fifteen feet anyone sees of a house

Decorative Driveways

Where structural requirements and appearance have to be met at once

Courtyards & Surrounds

Small enclosed areas where every square foot is seen