Making Hard Choices with Hardscape Design

In life, we often have to make choices between easy and hard. In some areas, those choices are inconsequential – such as how you like your eggs cooked or the mode you play a video game. Often, however, the choice does matter in your daily lives.

Sometimes the hard way is more challenging because it’s more thorough, and sometimes it’s harder because it’s wrong. How do you know? You can discover the difference with professional landscape help and excellent hardscape design and “soft” landscaping with your Lakeway yard. 

Neither choice is right or wrong, but often they go well together. Here are some of the options to add pieces of hardscape to your home.

Hardscape Design with Purpose

If you’ve never thought about hardscape design before, an excellent place to begin is its purpose. There are dozens of ways to hardscape a yard and thousands of variations within each. So before you start designing your yard, let’s consider how you plan to use it. 

Outdoor Living Space

Patios have morphed into outdoor living spaces in the last decade or two. Instead of a simple concrete pad with a lawn chair, grill, and plastic table, outdoor living spaces rival the home’s inside for comfortable gathering spaces.

Outdoor living spaces, like all hardscape designs, are very customizable. You can use various materials, from wood and stone to concrete and brick. The purpose behind it is different depending on your wants and needs.

Outdoor Kitchens

Sometimes Austin gets hot! But you still have to eat, and you may not always want to order out. Outdoor cooking is a time-honored way to beat the heat buildup of the oven in a kitchen.

But today, outdoor cooking can go well beyond the barbeque grill to match whatever your taste in culinary passion. For some outdoor, add a stone pizza oven. Others run electricity, water, and more into their outdoor kitchen to have a setup that rivals the inside.

And still, more may choose a grill built directly into their patio. The sky is the limit with your outdoor kitchen.

Water Features

With all that talk of cooking, it’s about time we cool off. That’s where water features come in. Water features are great for bringing this powerful yet calming elemental force into your yard.

In addition to adding a spot to cool off, flowing water can create ambient noise to drown out traffic and other unwelcome noise from your neighborhood. Flowing fountains, ponds, or bird baths may also be a haven for local wildlife to seek refuge.

Fire Pits

Fire pits are such a popular outdoor feature; we’ve already talked a lot about them. That’s because it serves a practical purpose while also holding primal appeal.

Firepits come in many shapes and sizes. You can use them for cooking or more for decoration. What all have in common is they give your guests a focal point to sit and gather. Fire also warms up a chilly evening, allowing your entertaining season to go beyond the summer and your evening to last past sundown.

Retaining Walls

As we continue down the list of Captain Planet’s Planeteers power rings, we move from water and fire to earth. But, of course, there’s already plenty of soil in your yard, so retaining walls aren’t about bringing more in but harnessing the land you have.

A retaining wall is a must if you have a hillside or plateau that is in danger of erosion or collapse. But hardscape design also incorporates retaining walls to add vertical space to your backyard.

With retaining wall hardscaping, you can add tiered gardens, each with one of your favorite plants.

Walkways

With all your landscape, you’ll want to find a way to keep people out of the flowers and frame the parts you want them to see. In these ways, walkways serve both decorative and practical purposes. Your walkway design can be solid with concrete or bricks or more of a suggestion with stepping stones.

You Got a Choice

So you can do this the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is you hire a professional to come in and do your hardscaping. The hard way is you try and do it on your own, don’t perform the necessary prep work, mess everything up, and then have to call in the pros.

What’s it going to be?