Inviting Outdoor Grilling Spaces

Beach days, park picnics, and backyard barbecues—wherever your Fourth of July weekend takes you, these products will elevate your event with ease.

Gatherings at the house tend toward the casual, with kid-friendly hangouts on the back patio.

These no-fuss landscaping ideas yield gardens that practically take care of themselves.

The first thing landscape designer Laura Cooper asked Devis and Purdy was to recall childhood gardens and outdoor play. In that spirit, she designed their backyard, integrating the high ground with the low just outside the “kids’ wing.” The resulting series of outdoor rooms on this quarter-acre is full of memory and play.

Achilleas and his friend Jovi tend the grill, which was Achilleas’s own design and is supported by a concrete beam—cast with slate stones embedded in it—just above the opening.

The dining room leads onto a terrace with a built-in concrete table and barbecue that are original to Raman and Schaffrath’s design. A pair of Hardoy butterfly chairs from Knoll are positioned by the pond.

Passionate cooks, the Burtons installed a Mugnaini wood-fired oven in their kitchen and had a custom Grillery fireplace-barbecue built into the concrete block wall on their deck. Beneath the grill they store oak firewood collected from their property.

A rainwater catching system irrigates the rooftop garden, which also has a dining area and grill.

Fusion Landscape Design worked with PATH to remake the backyard into a grown-up playground. Under the stairwell sits a tiny custom cedar sauna and an outdoor shower—just a literal hop, skip, and jump away from the sprawling in-ground eight-by-ten-foot hot tub. Down three short stairs, Gloster’s Elan dining table from Design Within Reach is surrounded by Spark chairs by Don Chadwick for Knoll and a built-in fire pit and DCS grill by Fisher & Paykel—all resting on a smooth surface of bluestone pavers.

Located off the great room, this exterior porch—subtracted from the main volume and therefore protected from bad weather—is also clad in locally milled cypress. "We chose cypress because of its history as a chief building material in the region’s earliest structures," explains Beck. "It contains a natural oil called cypressene, which deters insects and resists mold and mildew, making it an ideal wood for Florida’s hot, humid climate."

A sliding window between the kitchen and the barbecue area makes outdoor cooking a cinch. “In summer, we eat out there a fair amount,” the wife says. Wardle chose zinc for the exterior to complement the trees that surround the house on its northern fringes.