As foreign travel has increased, so has our appreciation of the continental lifestyle; and with it the idea that the garden can be an extension of the home. This has lead to an increase in the appeal of eating out on a garden patio. In itself the idea of eating a meal out in the garden is not a new one but it is only relatively recently that the patio has become an expected part of the garden. For its size it is the most expensive part of the garden and so some careful thought is need before you start to build one.
The first consideration has to be where to locate the patio within the garden and with the British climate it needs to be in as sunny a part as possible. The idea of shade from the hot summer sun is very appealing but in the UK you need to make the most of any sunshine. To sit out and eat you need somewhere that is very warm. To settle down and eat a meal means sitting in the same place for possibly an hour or more – cool will soon start to feel cold. Shady areas, that never get the benefit of the full sun, stay cold in the warmest of weather and so don’t get warm enough to sit for any length of time. If it gets too warm, and in a sunny sheltered garden this can easily happen, you can use large garden umbrellas to provide controllable shade. These have the advantage that they can be put up or down and move as needed; something which is not possible with other sources of garden shade.
Once you’ve found a suitable spot you have to consider the size and shape of your patio. You have to consider not just the space needed for a table and chairs but also people sitting at the table and moving around it. In practice this means ideally you need an area at least 4 metres by 5 metres. This may seem a lot but from experience I would strongly advise you to treat this as a minimum and only make the patio smaller if your garden is actually smaller than 5m x 4m. It may well worry you that the patio is going to dominate the garden; but in this case make the patio the feature of the garden. The other thing is the shape and so long as you ensure there is a 4m x 5m rectangle within the shape you can let your imagination take its reign. A plain rectangle can be visually rather boring and often too rigid. The easiest way is to unevenly extend some of the edges of the patio out to break up the straight edges. Do not be tempted to try to break up the paving with plant filled gaps. These soil filled gaps will invariably end up under table and chair legs which promptly sink into them – you will soon be out with some paving and mortar to fill them in.
Finally you have to choose a paving material to make the patio out of. To work the material needs to have a reasonably surface, be solid (loose materials like gravel never really work) and be sufficiently durable both to survive the weather and the movement of the people and furniture over it. That a side, there is a vast range of materials to chose from both natural and manmade.
