Paver Patios in Woodinville, WA

No, and it is worth being unambiguous about it. A drainfield disperses effluent into the soil around and below it, which requires that ground to stay undisturbed, uncompacted and not saturated by anything else. Excavating a patio base through it, running a machine across it, or covering it with an impermeable surface all compromise the system, and the consequences are expensive and unpleasant. On a Woodinville property the first design step is locating the tank and field properly — from records, or by survey where records are poor — and setting the layout around them.

Close to the house, in almost every case, and larger than it would be on a suburban lot. The temptation on several acres is to site a terrace at the best view or the nicest tree, and the result is a beautiful surface nobody uses because getting to it is a project. The patios that get used are the ones you step onto from a door. Where there is a view worth building for, the better answer is usually a main terrace at the house and a smaller destination area at the view, connected by a proper path rather than a walk across grass.

The specification is the same; the drainage sizing is not. On a large property, a terrace frequently sits below ground that is feeding water toward it from a substantial catchment, which is a very different load from a suburban lot handling its own rainfall. The base still wants six to eight inches of compacted free-draining rock for pedestrian use, but the drainage route under and around it has to be sized for what is actually arriving. On Hollywood Hill that usually means interception upslope; on the valley floor it means addressing the water table.

Smaller than the land tempts you into, and this is the one place we routinely talk a client down. On a quarter-acre suburban lot the patio is bounded by the garden, so the size decides itself. On five Woodinville acres there is no edge to push against, and a terrace scaled to the property rather than to the household ends up as a large empty paved area that reads as a car park and costs accordingly. What works out here is a patio sized to what actually happens on it — a table, a seating group, room to walk round both — with the generosity of the site expressed in what surrounds it rather than in square footage of paving: a wide gravel margin, a mown path leading away, planting at the edges. The other reason to keep it tight is practical. A large paved area on a septic property has to sit clear of the tank, the drainfield and its replacement area, and those constraints tend to define where a patio can go long before size becomes the question.