Granite Patio with a Cedar Gazebo

Some projects are a patio, and some turn the back of a house into a proper outdoor room. This one is the second kind. A large rear garden was built into a silver-grey granite patio with stone-clad raised beds, granite steps between the levels and a cedar gazebo to sit under, and it holds together as one piece of work.

The brief

The owners of this country home wanted the space behind the house to be usable and handsome in equal measure: a hard surface that could take furniture and foot traffic all year, a covered spot to sit out of the Irish weather, and planting worked into the design rather than pushed to the edges. The answer was natural granite underfoot, stone-clad raised beds through the middle, and a timber gazebo as the centrepiece.

The granite surface

Natural silver-grey granite was laid across the whole area in large flags. Granite is one of the hardest-wearing patio surfaces there is. It shrugs off frost, holds its colour, and grips underfoot even in the wet, as the rain-soaked photos show. The flags are laid to a consistent joint with falls built in so water runs off cleanly rather than sitting on the surface. Granite reads naturally against both the render of the house and the greenery around it, which is why it suits a large garden like this better than a lighter man-made tile.

The gazebo, raised beds and granite steps

The cedar gazebo gives the patio a covered heart, a place to sit out in any weather with the garden on all sides. Stone-clad raised beds run through the space with granite copings on top, bringing planting up to sitting height and breaking the patio into rooms rather than one flat expanse. Where the ground changes level, granite steps drop cleanly from one part of the garden to the next. Every hard edge on the job is granite, which ties the whole scheme together.

Why the base matters

Granite is heavy and unforgiving, so a granite patio asks even more of the groundwork than most. Each flag is bedded on a full mortar bed over a solid, well-drained, compacted base, which is what stops flags rocking, cracking or lifting once the weather works on them. It is the same principle Paul Delaney applies to every surface the crew lays.

"The base is everything. If the sub-base is wrong, the whole thing fails inside three years."

Paul Delaney, Delaney Tarmac

Built on that base, a granite patio like this one is a surface that will outlast almost anything else in the garden.