Pergolas, Pavilions and Fire Pits: Designing Outdoor Rooms in Rhode Island
A yard becomes a place to live when it has rooms. Here is how we build them in wood, stone and fire.
Most properties I visit have plenty of space and nowhere to be. A lawn runs to the fence, a patio sits against the house, and nobody uses either one after the first week of summer. What is missing is a room: a place with a roof or a frame over it, a floor underfoot, something to gather around and a reason to walk out to it. Wood is how a landscape starts to feel like rooms, and on this island it has to be built to take the salt.
Pergolas and arbors
A pergola is the simplest room there is. Four posts, a frame overhead, and suddenly a terrace has a ceiling of light and shade. I build them in cedar or in heavy timber with joinery you can see, sized to the house rather than to a catalog, and I set the posts on stone so the wood never sits in wet ground. An arbor does the same job at a smaller scale. Set over a gate in a stone wall or at the head of a path, it tells you where the garden begins.
Pavilions and outdoor showers
A pavilion is a pergola that grew up. It has a real roof, so it is usable in a June rain and a September evening, and it gives a pool terrace a destination at the far end. We frame ours in timber and finish them with the same cedar, bluestone and fieldstone as the rest of the property, so the pavilion, the pool and the walls read as one idea. On coastal properties I almost always add a cedar outdoor shower nearby. It is the most used square footage we build all summer.
Wood is how a landscape starts to feel like rooms.
Fire
A fire pit extends the season at both ends. In April and October it is the reason a family is outside at all. I like to set fire into stone, a bowl of granite on a bluestone terrace or a circle of flagstone at the edge of the lawn, placed where the smoke drifts away from the house and the view is worth sitting still for. Gas is convenient, wood is better company. Either way the seating should be built in, so the room is furnished even when the chairs are put away.
Gates, fences and the details
The small pieces of wood are the ones people touch every day. A cedar gate hung on iron hardware between two stone piers, a split rail fence running through an orchard, a run of cedar fence with white hydrangea spilling over it. These are what make a property feel cared for, and they are where stone and wood meet. We build them ourselves, from the same drawings as everything else, so the hardware, the caps and the joints match across the whole place.
A little about our work
Our gardens have earned two Silver Awards from the Rhode Island Nursery and Landscape Association, and in 2026 the Preservation Society of Newport County recognized our rain garden at Marble House with its Laurel Award for Horticulture. You can read more about the studio.
Beginning your project
The best time to plan a pergola, pavilion or fire pit is the fall or winter before you want to use it, so the timber can be ordered and the stone set before the season starts. You can see more of our wood and stone work. We work across Newport, Middletown, Portsmouth, Jamestown, Little Compton and Southeastern Massachusetts. Call me at 401-619-1607 or request a consultation.
Comments