Design Elements · Patios & Courtyards

Patios & Courtyards: 22 from real Napa & North Bay projects

A patio is a destination, so I start with what it's for — dinner for eight, coffee for two, a fire on a cool night — and size and place it around that function first. Then I connect it to the house and to the other destinations around it, so the landscape invites movement instead of stranding you on a slab. And every patio gets planting around its edges to soften the hardscape and settle it into the site. Done right, it feels less like something added to the yard and more like something that was always meant to be there.