Outdoor Kitchens & Bespoke Features

Outdoor living, properly designed

The best outdoor spaces aren’t just gardens — they’re rooms. Places to cook, to gather, to relax, to escape. The outdoor kitchen, the water feature, the bespoke firepit, the considered seating area: these are what separate a garden you walk through from a garden you live in.

We design and build bespoke outdoor living features across Bury St Edmunds and Suffolk, often as part of a larger garden scheme but sometimes as standalone additions to existing gardens. Most projects in this category are one-of-one — sketched and developed specifically for the client, the site, and the way it’s going to be used.

Outdoor kitchens

A good outdoor kitchen needs more than a barbecue dropped onto a slab. It needs proper service to the cook, shelter from the weather, surfaces that can handle the heat, and a thoughtful relationship to the dining area.

Our recent Courtyard Outdoor Kitchen project in a Suffolk village is a good example — two hand-laid brick arches housing a kitchen and pizza oven, with sandstone paving extended for table space and tiled inserts where the heat and grease need a wipe-clean surface. The brickwork took weeks; the result will last generations.

We typically incorporate:

• Built-in grills and pizza ovens — gas, charcoal or wood-fired, recessed into the surround
• Worktops in stone or porcelain — heat-tolerant, easy to clean
• Sinks and water supply — proper plumbing, properly drained, frost-protected
• Storage — for tools, fuel and dishes
• Shelter — pergolas, partial roofs, weather screens

Water features

A well-designed water feature changes a garden completely — the sound, the reflection, the wildlife it attracts. We’ve designed and built ponds, rills, basin features and naturalistic pools across Suffolk, often integrated with surrounding planting and stonework.

The Lakeside Sauna project involved re-profiling and replanting an existing pond, and the Lakeside Jetty project involved digging a new pond from scratch — both demonstrating the kind of larger water work we routinely do.

Bespoke metalwork

We work with skilled metalworkers on commissions ranging from firepits and pergola fittings to sun-loungers, gates and decorative screens. Most of these are designed in partnership with the client — drawn up to fit a specific spot in a specific garden, with the materials and finishes chosen to weather sympathetically with the surrounding planting and structure.