Game Day Backyard

A pergola kitchen with a TV wall, a putting green, and nothing to mow, in Nexton.

This family wanted a low-maintenance backyard built for one thing: hosting football games and hanging out with friends. Everything in the design serves that Saturday.

We built a pergola over a full outdoor kitchen and gave it a TV wall, so the person at the grill sees every play. The kitchen is stucco with a granite counter, a grill, a fridge and cabinets, and open shelving for the things you reach for all afternoon. Under that shelving the base is microcement rather than stucco, a small change that means spills and sauce wipe off instead of soaking in.

The rest of the yard became a putting green on artificial turf, a place to wander out to between halves, and nobody ever has to mow it.

The house is modern, so the pergola is finished in Hardie trim to match it, and the rafters are inset between the beams rather than run underneath them. That lifts the ceiling and leaves the roofline flush and squared off, where a traditional pergola would show projecting rafter tails. The custom post capitals and pedestals are the other detail that sets it apart from a standard kit pergola, and they are what you notice when you walk up.

The home is in Nexton, one of Summerville’s newer neighborhoods, so the design went through HOA review before we built it. We prepare and submit that paperwork as part of the job.

The house is new, put up by a production builder, and it came with landscaping that had not been thought through. The owner asked us to move some of it while we were there. A bald cypress had gone in close to the house, and in a yard this size it would have swallowed the place as it grew, so that one came out. This happens on most jobs. Once we are on site people point at the thing that has been bothering them, and we are always happy to sort it out.

It is a yard they use every weekend, and it asks very little of them the rest of the week.