Seat Walls & Garden Walls in Leesburg, VA

Seat Walls & Garden Walls for Leesburg Homes and Estates

A seat wall is one of the most useful details in any terrace design. At roughly eighteen to twenty inches tall with a cap twelve to sixteen inches wide, it provides casual seating, marks the edge of the patio and holds back a small grade change without the scale of a full retaining wall. Freestanding garden walls, lower or taller as needed, frame beds, define property edges and give a large garden bones.

Construction follows the style. Segmental block seat walls sit on compacted gravel and take a stone or matching cap. Natural stone and veneered walls usually rise from a concrete footing, with a block core faced in fieldstone, wallstone or cut stone. Mortared freestanding walls need footings below the roughly 24 inch frost depth to avoid cracking, while dry-laid fieldstone walls, the kind seen along old farm lanes near Waterford and Lucketts, can flex with the seasons. Thick bluestone or granite caps with eased edges make a wall comfortable to sit on and handsome to look at.

Seat walls work well around fire pits, at the edge of a terrace in River Creek or Raspberry Falls, and as low front garden walls on older streets near downtown. They are also an ideal place for lighting, with cap lights or hidden LED strips washing the face at night. Matching the stone to the foundation or nearby steps makes the terrace look original to the house. On a sloped lot, an uphill seat wall can double as a low retaining wall, with gravel and a drain behind it.