Fire Features & Outdoor Living in Amherst, New Hampshire.

A fire feature is what stretches a Amherst yard from two usable seasons to three. We lay the space out on site first — seat height, circle diameter, how far the chairs sit from the flame, and which way the wind carries smoke across rolling former farmland and woods around a historic village green — because geometry is what decides whether a fire pit gets used or ignored.

Only once that reads right do we set stone, wrapping the fire with seat walls and terrace so the whole space is designed around where people actually gather.

Designers keep sending us Southern NH work for one reason: what gets built matches what was drawn. We hold the spec, raise conflicts early, and document as we go — including on the Jonathan Keep Landscape Design projects throughout this portfolio.

The part nobody photographs: where the pallets sit, where the excavator tracks, and what the property looks like on a Friday afternoon. In Amherst we plan all of that up front and hold the schedule we gave you at the start.

Amherst sits in Hillsborough County, and most weeks we are somewhere in this pocket of Southern NH — which means shorter travel, faster site visits, and a crew that already knows how ground behaves around here.

A fire feature is a masonry structure, not decoration. We build on a footing carried below frost — which on stony glacial till — the same ground that produced the town’s old walls means going deeper than most expect — and line the core so the visible fieldstone or granite never takes the thermal punishment directly. That is why ours do not spall and crack after two winters.

Wood, gas, or a fire bowl: we run sleeves and gas lines during the build, and face the feature to suit the Federal and colonial antiques on the green, custom estates beyond it it belongs to.