Fire Features & Outdoor Living in Kennebunkport, Maine.

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

We buy from New England quarries and yards we have used for years, and we hand-pick rather than take a pallet sight unseen. For Kennebunkport, that usually means matching color and texture to the shingle-style summer cottages and sea captains’ houses already on the street.

A fire feature is what stretches a Kennebunkport 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 rocky open coast and tidal river frontage along Ocean Avenue — 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.

A fire feature is a masonry structure, not decoration. We build on a footing carried below frost — which on granite ledge under thin soil, exposed to full North Atlantic weather 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 shingle-style summer cottages and sea captains’ houses it belongs to.

A large share of our Maine work is executing drawings for landscape architects — reading elevations, holding the specified batter and joint, and flagging a conflict before it becomes a change order. Much of it in ongoing collaboration with Jonathan Keep Landscape Design.