Patios in Lover

Porcelain comes first. Calibrated twenty millimetre porcelain absorbs almost nothing. There is no open pore for algae to root in and no water in the body of the slab for a frost to expand, so a shaded Lover terrace in porcelain stays workable with an occasional wash. It has to be laid on a full bed of mortar over a slurry primed back, never on dabs, because voids under a dense unit crack it.

The stones, honestly. Sandstone is warm and easy to lay and it is the one that greens worst in shade, because it is porous. Limestone is more even in colour and marks with iron. Granite is dense and copes far better with a permanently damp corner. Travertine we would steer you away from in a Lover garden. Hand cut stone varies in thickness and the mortar bed levels it; calibrated stone is sawn to one depth.

Getting the old surface out. Old concrete, decayed flags on sand, brick paviours or a raised bed all come out first, along with any roots crossing the area and any made ground. We excavate to firm formation and the spoil goes into a grab lorry or a skip and leaves with us.

The sub base. A geotextile separator over soft ground, then MOT Type 1 in compacted layers of about 100mm. Under trees the ground is often full of fine root and holds moisture, so the separator and the compaction matter more here than they do on an open plot.

Falls, and why they matter more in shade. A sunlit patio forgives a lazy fall because it dries anyway. A shaded one does not. Paving runs away from the building and finishes two courses below the DPC where it can, which is the point of Approved Document C, and the water goes to a gully, a soakaway where the ground takes it, or a permeable build so the runoff stays on your land.

Jointing. This is where shaded patios are won and lost. Stone is hand pointed in a matched mortar or given a brush in compound worked deep into a full joint and struck off. Porcelain takes a grout made for dense units. A joint filled short holds leaf mould and water, and that is exactly what the moss grows in.

Edges and steps. Edging bedded and haunched in concrete, a coping to any low retaining wall, a kerb line at the lawn and a gravel border along the house wall to take the drip. Steps get set out before the paving on a sloping woodland plot.

Repairs and cleaning. Re-bedding rocking slabs, rebuilding a sunken corner, swapping cracked units, renewing failed jointing, and cleaning down a green terrace and correcting the falls so it stops coming back every autumn.

Thomas comes to see the Lover garden, the levels against the house, where the shade falls and where water runs now, and prices the patio himself. A plot close to trees stays damp and shady for much of the year, so the choice of stone and the fall matter more than usual, and he talks you through both.

The price is laid out as digging and removal, the hardcore base, levels and the line the water will take, edging and any steps, the stone itself, and the joints. Thomas is the one you deal with throughout. Everything comes in and out through the side of the house or a gate, with boards down over the lawn and paths. Each slab goes down on a full mortar bed. The site is swept every evening and the soil leaves with us. Hitting roots, an old slab or a buried drain in the dig means a photo and a price for you before we go on.

The New Forest National Park Authority decides planning at Lover and looks harder at design and materials than a district council, though a patio at ground level behind the house is normally permitted development. There is no conservation area and a handful of listed entries. The property map shows what applies, and paving is not building control work.

Ring rather than use the form. A paver that has tipped up at one edge, or a step that has sunk, catches feet, and a shady Lover patio in winter can grow green slime slippery enough to put someone on the ground.

Keep people off the worst of it and put something on it to mark it. If the problem is slipperiness rather than damage, tell us, because a clean, a treatment and a better fall often solve it without relaying. Where slabs have lifted, the worst are normally taken up and rebedded on the first visit, and then we check whether the base under the rest is still sound. Garden jobs are booked Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. Any call we miss is returned as soon as we can.

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A north facing terrace under trees gets a fraction of the drying that the same paving would get twenty feet away in the open. Algae need moisture and something to hold on to, and a porous slab with half empty joints gives them both. That is why the same patio can be green at one end and clean at the other.

Shade decides the material, because a dense porcelain or granite denies the growth a foothold that sandstone hands it. The falls follow from it, because a shaded surface has to shed water rather than hold a film of it. So does the jointing, because a full, well compacted joint is the difference between a surface that sheds leaf litter and one that composts it.

The trees themselves matter as well. In Lover we do not cut a root plate back to make a level. Where roots cross the area we lift the build slightly, put more stone in, keep the jointing flexible and accept a shallower dig over that stretch, because a tree that dies two years after the patio was laid costs you far more than the paving did.

Nearby places we also cover for patios, with straight-line distances from Lover, and the other trades we offer in Lover itself.

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