Outdoor Kitchens

The part you look at is veneer and a countertop. Behind that face is a core, and the core carries everything else. Baudi builds cores in block, because setting block is what this crew does most weeks of the year.

Layout comes first. Where the cook stands, and whether that position blocks the path to the door. Which way the wind carries smoke, because a grill venting into the seating is a mistake nobody forgives. How far the hot appliances sit from the house wall, from a wood post, from the underside of a deck. Where the propane cylinder and the trash live, since those two decide whether the island is pleasant to use or a daily annoyance.

Appliance openings are dimensioned to the units you are actually buying. Every drop-in grill, side burner and access door has a rough opening published by its manufacturer, and the core is built to that number, which means the appliances get chosen before the block goes up. A grill that arrives two inches wider than its hole is a problem with no cheap answer once the counter is set.

A patio is a field of separate units on a compacted base. It is meant to flex a little, and a unit that moves can be lifted and reset. How that base gets built is covered on our paver installation page and there is no reason to repeat it here.

A kitchen island or an outdoor fireplace is the opposite kind of object: rigid, heavy, and landing all that weight on a small footprint. A masonry fireplace and chimney can run to several tons standing on fifteen square feet. Set that on a patio base and it will not ride the winter the way the patio does. It goes down, it takes the surrounding stone with it, and because the structure is rigid the movement shows as a crack through the firebox or a chimney visibly out of plumb against the house line.

So these get a poured footing carried past the frost line, which in this county means digging on the order of four feet, bearing on undisturbed soil rather than fill. The footing goes in first and the patio is built up to it afterward, with the field cut around the finished structure. That order is why we raise the kitchen while the patio is still being designed, even when it will not be built for two more years. Adding an island later is real work: pavers up, base opened, footing dug through it, structure built, field closed back around it.

A fire pit is the lighter case. A dry-laid ring of wall block or cut stone puts little enough load on the ground that it can sit on a properly compacted patio base and move with it. A mortared pit is rigid again and wants a footing of its own. Either way the inside face is firebrick or a steel insert, because ordinary block and standard mortar spall when they take direct flame, and the floor has to drain. A pit that fills with rain and then freezes comes apart from the inside.

This is where outdoor kitchens go wrong, and it is a coordination problem rather than a construction one. Baudi does the masonry. The gas line and any line-voltage circuit are the work of a licensed plumber and a licensed electrician, scheduled around our build rather than performed by us. What we own is making sure their work has somewhere to go.

That means sleeves and chases built in while the structure is open. A gas sleeve running under the patio from the meter or the tank. Conduit to the outlet locations and a separate run for the refrigerator. A stub for a sink supply and, more importantly, a drain with a low point that can be blown out in November, since plenty of outdoor sinks split their first winter because nobody put a shutoff anywhere reachable.

Timing is the whole argument. Running a sleeve while the excavation is already open is a length of pipe. Running the same line after the stone is set means opening the field, trenching, and rebuilding the base and surface over it. If the property is on propane rather than natural gas, tank location and line sizing need settling before the island is positioned. And if you want the counter or the steps around it lit, the low-voltage wire wants to go in at the same moment. Our landscape lighting page covers what that gets you.

The number that matters on an outdoor counter is absorption. A porous slab pulls water into itself, the water freezes, and the surface flakes and pits from above. Everything else about the choice is secondary.

Granite is the usual answer for a reason: dense, low absorption, indifferent to a hot pan. Full-thickness bluestone reads native against an older house and gives a thermal finish that grips underfoot, but it takes in more water than granite, so it will patina and it benefits from a penetrating sealer. Porcelain slab is dense and holds colour, though edge detail and support underneath need thinking about. Cast concrete counters can look excellent and are the most likely to hairline crack outdoors. Marble and limestone are the ones we will talk you out of, because they etch when something acidic lands on them, which outdoors means a dropped drink or a squeezed lime.

Two details get skipped. Stone is strong in compression and weak in bending, so a bar overhang past roughly a foot wants steel or a corbel under it, and an unsupported nose is where a counter eventually snaps. And the surface gets a slight fall built in, away from the grill and the doors, so rainwater leaves rather than standing in front of the appliances and freezing in the seam.