Fire Pits & Outdoor Fireplaces in Seattle

Gas is the more practical choice and wood is the one people usually want, so it comes down to how you will actually use it. Gas lights instantly, has no smoke to blow across a neighbour's garden in a dense city lot, produces no ash to clear, and needs no dry fuel store — which in this climate is not a trivial consideration, because wood left outside here is wet wood. Wood gives real heat, the sound and the smell, and costs less to build. The practical constraint is that a gas line has to be run at build stage; adding one under a finished patio means lifting it. If there is any chance you will want gas, run the line even if you build for wood now.

Further than most people place them, and the specifics depend on your jurisdiction and the fuel type, so we confirm the local requirement for your address rather than working to a rule of thumb. The general principles hold everywhere: real clearance from the building, from combustible fencing and from overhanging branches — which on a Seattle lot with mature conifers is frequently the binding constraint rather than the house. Anything under a covered structure needs specific consideration for ventilation and heat, and is not simply a matter of distance. Getting this settled before the patio is laid out is straightforward; discovering it afterwards is not.

Substantially bigger than the pit, and this is the dimension most home-built fire features get wrong. The usable feature is the ring of space around the fire, and it needs to hold seating at a comfortable distance from the heat plus a circulation route behind that seating so people are not squeezing between chairs and the fire to get past. In practice a fire pit that is three or four feet across wants a paved area of roughly eighteen to twenty feet in diameter around it to work properly for six people. Squeezing that into a small garden usually means choosing between a fire feature and a dining area rather than fitting both.

Yes, and how disruptive it is depends on what you want. A freestanding fire bowl or table needs nothing but a sound level surface and sensible clearances, and is genuinely a same-day change. A built-in pit means cutting into the existing paving and building off the base underneath, which works well if that base is adequate and less well if it is not — and we would rather find that out before starting. The expensive retrofit is gas: running a line under an existing patio means lifting and relaying a route across it, which frequently costs more than the fire feature itself.