Seating Walls

Seating Walls

Take a seat. Integrated seating walls add functionality and structure to your patio without the clutter of furniture.

A seating wall lives or dies below the surface. Everything you sit on rests on the base, so we start with excavation to solid ground, a compacted gravel footing, and a build in either engineered concrete block or poured concrete depending on the height and whether the wall also holds back soil. On top of that structure comes the veneer, natural stone or brick chosen to echo the patio, and finally a wide, smooth cap. We size seat walls around 18 to 22 inches high and 14 to 18 inches deep at the cap so they sit like a bench rather than a ledge, and we overhang the cap slightly to throw water clear of the face.

In our climate the details that keep a wall standing are the ones you never see. Vancouver winters swing above and below freezing over and over, and water that soaks into a wall and then freezes will pop veneer and crack caps over a few seasons. We build on a compacted base below frost-susceptible ground, add a capillary break or flashing behind the veneer so moisture cannot wick up into the stone, and seal the cap so it sheds our heavy rain. Where a seat wall also retains soil, drainage becomes the priority: a gravel backfill and weep or drain path behind the wall relieve the water pressure that our wet ground builds up. Under roughly three feet of retained soil we can integrate seating into a retaining wall; above that, the structure needs engineering first and the bench becomes a bonus on top of a wall built to hold ground safely.