A patio seating wall, also known as a patio sitting wall, is a short wall with a bench or seating built into it. Thanks to their stylistic appeal and pragmatic functionality, patio seating walls are becoming more popular in patio design.
Besides providing comfortable seating and an aesthetically pleasing design element for your patio, a seating wall can increase your property value, improve soil stability and encourage outdoor social activities while being environmentally friendly and requiring little maintenance.
1. Enhance Your Patio’s Aesthetics
Have you ever looked at your patio and thought it lacked a certain flair? A patio seating wall may just be what you need to spiff up your yard and turn it into the envy of your neighborhood.
A patio seating wall can act as a design focal point for your outdoor living spaces and enhance the charm and elegance of your patio. Well-designed seating walls can add to the beauty of any landscape and help define space by separating patios from other areas.
Feel free to match materials to create a uniform look for your patio. For example, if you have a paver patio, you can opt for a seating wall made of paver stone. To add an extra flourish, build a fire pit next to your seating wall and illuminate your paver patio with a garden light. You can add columns to the ends of your seating walls and outfit your paver patio with outdoor furniture.
2. Increase Functionality and Seating Capacity
Besides making your backyard landscape more beautiful and elegant, seating walls serve functional purposes too. Do you like to have friends and family over for garden parties but find yourself scrambling for folding lawn chairs or dragging dining room chairs into your yard to provide overflow seating for your guests?
Seating walls are a great way to provide permanent seating in your outdoor space. They eliminate the need to set up chairs last-minute to accommodate guests and let you fit a large number of people into a tight area without additional seating. If you have a small backyard but like to host big parties, a seating wall is just what you need.
And seating walls aren’t just for sitting. You can also use a seat wall to create a planter wall for flower beds to grow plants. A seating wall can also double as a retaining wall to support the soil in your garden.
3. Improve Outdoor Living Comfort
By creating a centralized outdoor living space, seating walls can foster social activities in your yard. A popular seating wall design places the seat wall adjacent to a fire pit to create an enticing and welcoming space for friends and family to rest and mingle in the backyard.
A fire pit can also keep your guests warm and comfortable on colder days, extending your outdoor season. The flickering flames from fire pits can add to your backyard landscape’s ambiance and create a cozy and homey atmosphere. You can even make campfire s’mores with the fire pit.
The average height of seating walls is about 20 inches, including the cap, but some seat walls have built-in backrests that add 1 to 2 extra feet. This additional height can enhance your privacy by creating a visual barrier to shield your patio from passersby.
4. Boost Property Value and Curb Appeal
While many people understand how a custom deck or a fresh coat of paint can boost their property value, a seating wall remains an often-overlooked way to increase a house’s curb appeal and value.
According to Better Homes & Gardens, attractive landscaping, including a well-designed seating wall, can add 5% to 12% to the value of a house. Fire pits, columns and other additional design features can increase your property value even more.
The bottom line is seating walls are great investments that more than pay for their costs.
5. Low Maintenance and Durable
Seating walls offer many benefits, and they require little maintenance compared to other patio furniture. Once you’ve constructed a seat wall, you can enjoy it for years without spending much time or energy on its upkeep.
Made of durable materials such as stone or concrete, seating walls don’t break apart, rust or get damaged by the elements. Stone veneer seat walls are easy to clean — spray them with a garden hose and they’re good as new.
If you put cushions on your seating walls, don’t worry if they get soaked by rain. Leave them out and they’ll dry quickly.
6. Support Retaining Walls and Slope Stability
If you live in a sloped area, a retaining wall can help hold the soil on the ground surface to prevent erosion. Retaining walls are often used to elevate patios above their surrounding grade as well.
By building your seating wall on a slope and using it to support the soil on the ground, you can make it double as a retaining wall, contributing to a safer and more stable outdoor space.
Alternatively, you can build your seating wall next to an existing retaining wall to give the retaining wall extra structural support, resulting in maximum slope stability. In this case, the retaining wall can also serve as the backrest of your seating wall to provide extra comfort.
7. Environmentally Friendly Options
By using natural materials such as bluestone, cultured stone and brick, you can make your seating wall environmentally friendly. If you have a paver patio, opt for a paver stone wall to match your materials and achieve a uniform look.
To further support sustainability, make your seating walls permeable. Made of porous materials, such as gravel or rocks, a permeable seating wall allows rainwater to flow through to replenish groundwat er.
Avoid capping your seating wall with rough flagstone or any irregular surfacing that may cause discomfort. Instead, opt for a material with a smooth surface, such as concrete or paver stones, for your cap. Add pillows or cushions on your sitting wall cap to provide extra comfort.
Conclusion
A seating wall brings aesthetic and functional benefits, including increasing your property value, enhancing your patio’s appearance and improving your outdoor living space. It can also double as a retaining wall or support an existing one to strengthen soil stability.
At Prince William Home Improvement, we can accommodate your fabulous seating wall ideas by guiding you through the landscape design process and installing the patio, patio enclosure, seating wall, retaining wall, fire pit or columns of your dreams. Call us today at 703-492-1294 to receive a free estimate for your home improvement project.
