Add some spark to your garden
Outdoor fireplaces provide a touch of magic for al fresco social occasions. Damian Wendleborn from the Auckland Garden Design Festival shares his advice on how to choose one for your place.
Aside from the proliferation of productive gardening and the colourful resurgence of flowering perennials, another element that is increasingly popular in garden design is the outdoor fireplace.
I am a card-carrying outdoor fire enthusiast. They provide a great focus for outdoor entertaining and there is unquestionably a restorative effect to the gentle flickering and glowing embers.
I will look for any excuse to fire up the rusty old fire bowl on a Friday night and endeavour to entice my wife outside to sit and stare into the flames as the stresses of the week melt away.
For the garden designer, the fire can be exploited as a tool for spatial control and structure within a garden. Not only can it be an attractive focal point to anchor a view, but the placement of a built fire element or fire pit will create a distinct zone in front of or around it, identifying this space within the wider garden scheme.
Tiling, textured plaster, in-situ concrete, steel and stonework are all commonly used materials for construction. More natural construction materials such as cob (a mixture of sand, straw and clay) can also be employed, but suffer from exposure to the weather, so overhead protection may need to be considered, lest your creation slowly reverts back to its constituent ingredients.
Cooking on an outdoor fire or in a pizza oven delivers a fantastic flavour profile to even the humblest of foods. Several off-theshelf units are designed primarily around the cooking aspect, with adjustable shelf heights and even baskets that sit up inside the chimney for less heat and more smoke.
My fire bowl does a pretty decent job on a boneless leg of lamb. While it is sometimes a bit tricky to control heat level and the cooking portion of the evening seems all too brief in comparison with the preparation time, this sense of inefficiency is more than offset by the social interactions that occur around the fire in the hours leading up to meal time.
Then, of course, there is dessert. Who can deny the attraction of a well-toasted marshmallow squeezed between two chocolate thin biscuits?
Placement and design
First, it is a good idea to check with your local territorial authority in terms of what planning or building rules might be applicable to the placement or design. Understandably, there are often rules around placement in relation to combustible materials such as yours or your neighbour’s house, shed or fence.
Wooden decks and fires require some creative thought as to how to minimise any potential for disaster. You should also consider things like proximity to your neighbour’s washing line or windows to minimise nuisance.
The use of a ready-made steel or concrete firebox can be a good idea as these factors have already been accounted for in the design of the steel unit.
Fuel
A gas-burning unit generally doesn’t emit quite as much heat as a wood-burner, meaning there are usually more relaxed controls
Wooden decks and fires require some creative thought as to how to minimise any potential for disaster.
around distances from the fire to objects that could potentially ignite. Similarly, the nuisance factor of smoke bothering your neighbour is eliminated.
Bio-ethanol gel burning units are small and transportable, offering a soft ambient glow but a smaller degree of heat.
These can be very ornamental and there seems to be an everincreasing range available. They’re a good choice for those who rent or have decked areas and want something to act as a focal point for social gatherings.
The simplest and generally cheapest fire is likely be some form of brazier or fire-bowl. A trawl through Pinterest will yield many creative ideas, such as reusing old washing machine inners or truck wheel rims.
The main disadvantage of these units is the lack of a chimney, meaning that during the building of your fire base, smoke can (and will) waft in any direction. This does calm down once a good bed of embers is created or barbecue charcoal is added.
Again, these should be placed with care, so that any sparks or heat emitted from the base of the unit will not cause damage or disaster. A gravelled or concreted area generally tends to work best.
Cost
You don’t have to spend much for a simple unit – you might already have the materials lying around the backyard for a simple fire pit.
An imported fire bowl unit might cost as little as $200, while something more bespoke welded up by a blacksmith could be $800-$1000.
Plastered masonry-based fireplaces would come in at approximately $10,000, dependent on the level of detailing. To clad or construct in stone would obviously add time and cost, so perhaps expect to pay somewhere in the vicinity of $15,000-plus.
Pizza ovens typically range from $3500 to $10,000 in the main, all set up and ready to go. Purchasing a kitset can help reduce the cost if you are reasonably ‘‘handy’’.
Put aside a day or two for a trip to the Auckland Garden Design Festival to gather some more ideas.
❚ This year’s Auckland Garden Design Festival is being held from November 25-26 2017. For more information visit gardendesignfest.co.nz