What Are the Best Outdoor Living Add-Ons for a Savannah Patio? (Lighting, Fire Pits, Seat Walls)

Most people come to us with the patio that they want already decided, but they leave everything else open. They know they want a nice place to sit, but they usually haven’t thought about whether any of the extras are worth spending the money on. Things like the lighting, the fire pit, the seat wall, the grill area, or the landscaping around it. What you have to understand is that some of those features just take really beautiful pictures and then go unused for years.

My name is Randy Thompson and I founded All Out Hardscapes & Lighting Solutions. Over more than 10 years we have built over 150 patios, walkways, and outdoor living spaces across Savannah and the Coastal Lowcountry, from Wilmington Island to Pooler and Richmond Hill. We are the only Techo-Bloc Pro certified installer in the Lowcountry, which is a certificate that says I’m trained in depth by the manufacturer of the product I use. We are also AMP-authorized for low-voltage outdoor lighting, so we do all the design and installation of the lighting on all of our jobs. We don’t have to hire any of that out.

Here’s my professional opinion, and it may sound odd coming from a guy whose whole trade is stone, but lighting is the add-on I would always choose to do first. I had owned my house two years before I ever sat out back on my patio at nine o’clock. The night I finally did, sitting out there under the lights, it was the most peaceful time I’d had in a long time. That’s what your money is buying. An add-on or extra that doesn’t make you want to be outside more often is just a decoration.

Which Add-Ons Actually Earn Their Space on a Patio?

Definitely lighting first. After that it would be a fire pit. Then a seat wall and a simple grill area. After that, choose your extras to fit your life, whether that is a pergola or a hot tub. Adding things in that order has nothing to do with how much it actually costs. It’s more about how much more time you get in your backyard with each one.

A patio by itself is really just a floor, and you only use that in daylight and in good weather. Every add-on on that list is taking one of these conditions off the table:

• Darkness: it ends the evening at sunset.
• Cool nights: they send everybody back inside.
• Not enough seating: it caps how many people you can have over.
• Cooking indoors: it pulls the host away from the party.

Rank them by how much time they’re costing you. The second thing that matters is what each add-on requires. Some need power or another skilled trade we have to bring in. And some add-ons need to be decided while you’re still designing the patio because they get built into it during construction.

Why Is Lighting the First Thing I Would Add?

Because it is the only one that gives you more time on your patio. The rest of those extras change what you do outside. But the lighting changes whether you can even use your patio after dark at all. For most of the year here the evening is the best part of the day, and most backyards go black at sunset and shut down.

A lot of times people think that adding lighting means we will be pulling electrical wire through a yard where their kids and their dog spend a ton of time. That’s not how it is at all though. Low-voltage means the fixtures run on 12 volts, stepped down from the 120 volts in your house by a transformer, which is a small box that goes on the wall next to an outside outlet. The wire that goes around your patio and yard only has a small fraction of the electricity that goes inside the house. Most people don’t know that modern equipment does not carry the risks that older equipment used to carry. It is very safe.

We learned the other half of this at our own house. We bought a yard full of those landscape lights in a box that you can get at the big stores. Our lawn care guy accidentally hit one with the mower and it exploded. The whole line of lights went down and it was nothing but a mess and a waste of our money. Those eight-dollar solar stakes do put off enough light on the ground, and we owned plenty of them. But they weren’t enough to make us want to be outside. Light that only lights up the ground isn’t the same thing as a mood light you want to sit under.

You’ve also probably never been told that good up-lighting is about shadows, not brightness. Up-lighting means a fixture that’s set at ground level aimed up at a tree, a column, or the face of the house to create depth and shadow. Flood a wall with a light that just shines evenly all over it and it makes it look flat and the house kinda feels like a parking lot. But if you aim the light sideways so it goes across the texture of the side of the house, it throws its own shadows, and the yard feels more 3D. Color does a lot of the work too. We stay in a range from about 3200K down to 2800K. K stands for Kelvin, the number that tells you how warm or cool a light looks. That range we use is a golden color, not quite white and not quite yellow, and it matches the light that shines out of your kitchen window, so the backyard feels like another room of the house instead of a jobsite. Exactly what warmth of light we use depends on the house, because a white house and a dark brick house reflect light in very different ways.

Is a Fire Pit Worth It in Coastal Georgia?

For most people, yes, and it is not even about winter, because we don’t get much winter here. What we get is a lot of cool nights in a row that make it just cold enough to make people want to go back inside, and a fire pit solves that problem and keeps people outside instead.

We can also tell you when we get the most calls about installing fire pits. Every year as the weather starts cooling off, fire pit requests come all at once and the phone stays busy. If you want one for the cool season, you have to start the process a couple of months in advance, otherwise you won’t be able to use it when you need it.

A fire pit is stone work, which is really our forte. Anything with stone in it, fire pits, barbecues, seat walls, is our specialty. You want to decide early where it’s going to go, because a fire pit usually has every chair in the yard around it. That changes the shape and the size of the patio we would build underneath it. And it’s much easier to figure it in during the design phase than to add it later after the pavers are installed.

Do I Need a Seat Wall, or Will Patio Furniture Do the Job?

If your patio has plenty of room and you like your furniture, furniture is fine. A seat wall makes the most sense when you have limited square footage, or when there’s a fire pit in the picture. A seat wall is a low wall run along the edge of a patio at about chair height, right around 18 inches, with a smooth top that is used as a bench.

You really only need one if your space is limited. Six chairs around a fire pit take up a lot of space and keep you from walking on floor space you paid for. A seat wall adds seating to the perimeter, out of the way of people walking. It’s permanently affixed so it won’t move in a big storm. It also gives the patio a sort of edge, so that it feels like a room instead of just an open space on a slab.

The catch is that a seat wall is masonry tied into the patio, so you have to plan for it in the design phase, because it really can’t be added in later if the patio was not laid out for it. If you think you might want one eventually, just tell us that during the walk-through and we will lay the patio out with room for it.

The Grill Area Almost Every Homeowner Asks Us for Now

Something has changed in what people are asking for, and it caught us off guard. Of the last five or six grill quotes we have written, every one of those homeowners wanted the same thing, and it was not a full outdoor kitchen. Almost nobody is asking to build a countertop around a grill anymore.

What they want is a small U-shaped area, three sides of stone and open at the front, that a grill just rolls into. It looks like it’s built in, but when you need to clean it or cover it, you just slide it right out. We still have two jobs coming up with the full built-ins for an outdoor kitchen, so some people still like to go that route. But we have noticed that most people are asking for the U-shaped version now.

We actually really like doing it this way because a full built-in only works with one grill’s dimensions, and grills wear out and have to be replaced. When that happens, the replacement grill has to fit the hole you built. A U-shaped area can accommodate any grill you choose.

Two Bigger Add-Ons That Usually Come Up Later

Pergolas have become very popular as well, and we have three of those jobs on the books right now. A pergola is an open framework of beams over a patio that gives you some shade without closing the space in. We actually bring in a pergola company for those jobs, because it is not stone and it is not our specialty. That is how we prefer to work. If something isn’t what we are specifically skilled at, which is stonework, we will refer you to somebody, or show you something similar we can do in stone.

Hot tub platforms are a smaller side of what we do, but they’ve gotten busy. Short-term rentals are the cause of that, because a hot tub is a great selling point for an Airbnb, and those owners want a paver platform for the tub instead of a wooden deck. A paver platform is a section of patio built specifically to hold the weight of a hot tub. A hot tub full of water and people is very heavy, and that weight has to be carried by what’s under the pavers. The pavers don’t do the heavy lifting.

The thing you need to plan for is power. A hot tub needs a certified electrician, and that is not us. We don’t do any of the wiring. That is a separate thing with a different skilled tradesman. And you want to schedule it early, because a finished platform with no power to it is nothing but an expensive place to stand or sit.

When Should I Skip an Add-On for Now?

Not every add-on is a good idea for every project, and some of them are better to just wait on. If you’re just not really a person who goes outside a lot, putting in a nice stone patio doesn’t change that. We owned solar stakes for years and stayed indoors the whole time. Professional lighting worked for us because it made the yard more inviting and made us want to spend time out there, not because it made the yard brighter.

If the patio is still in the design phase, deal with just the patio part first. The add-ons just need to be planned for during design, and then they can be built later. It’s so much easier to build a patio that’s already set up for a seat wall or a fire pit than to add it later from scratch. And if your budget only lets you do one add-on this year, just do one. Don’t split up your budget and compromise on quality. One add-on done completely and correctly is way better than three that get rushed and cut short.

If what you want is not our specialty or skill, we will tell you that upfront. We are not afraid to say that something is not a skill we have. We will just send you to the right person, or show you something similar in stone that we could do. But we won’t take a job that won’t turn out to be something we are proud of.