Outdoor Living
Outdoor living: making the yard a room
Shade, a place to sit that is not a folding chair, and something warm after sunset. Those three things decide whether a yard gets used in October.
Outdoor living is the part of landscape design that decides how many months of the year a yard is used. Brooks Landscape and Design builds outdoor fireplaces and fire pits, wood arbors, overhangs and seat walls across Ventura County and the Conejo Valley, designed as rooms with edges rather than furniture placed on a lawn.
A room needs edges, and that is what a seat wall is for
An open lawn with chairs on it does not read as a place to sit, and people drift back indoors from it without knowing why. A low seat wall, a change in paving, an arbor overhead or a planting edge gives the area a boundary, and the boundary is what makes it feel like somewhere rather than anywhere.
Seat walls also solve a practical problem cheaply: they are permanent seating that does not blow over, fade or need storing, and they hold their line against a slope while they do it.
Fireplaces and fire pits are different tools
A fire pit is social and circular: everybody faces in, nobody is at the head of it, and it suits a group. A fireplace is directional and architectural: it gives a room a wall and a focal point, it screens a view you would rather not have, and it seats fewer people more comfortably.
Choosing between them by looks is how people end up with the wrong one. Choose by how you actually sit, then decide how it should look.
Shade is the part that gets cut, and should not be
In inland Ventura County, an unshaded patio is unusable for the hours most people want to use it. Arbors and overhangs are usually the first thing removed when a budget tightens, and they are the element with the largest effect on how often the finished yard is occupied. If something has to come out of a first phase, we would rather it were a water feature.
Questions people actually ask
Gas or wood for an outdoor fireplace?
Gas gets used, wood gets admired. Gas lights in seconds on a weeknight, which is when most people are actually home, while a wood fire is an occasion that needs planning, fuel storage and cleaning. Wood burning also carries local air quality restrictions that gas does not.
Do I need a permit for a fire pit or fireplace?
Whether a fire pit or fireplace needs a permit depends on the city, the fuel, the size and where it sits in relation to structures. We check it for your address rather than guessing, because the answer differs between Malibu, Calabasas and Simi Valley.
Will an arbor make the yard feel smaller?
Usually the opposite. Defining part of a yard as a room makes the rest of it read as garden, and an undivided space of any size tends to feel like a leftover.
Other services
The other services Brooks Landscape and Design performs, usually on the same project as outdoor living.
- 3D Landscape DesignWalk the finished yard before a shovel moves.
- Pools & SpasCustom pools, spas, waterfalls, streams and water walls.
- Outdoor KitchensBarbecues, pizza ovens, bars and polished concrete counters.
- HardscapeStone entries, driveways, pavers, decking and walls.
- Softscape & IrrigationPlanting, lighting, irrigation, drainage, turf and dry river beds.
Tell us about the property
Send a few lines about what you have and what you want. We will tell you what we think it takes, what order it should happen in, and whether we are the right company for it.