Fire Features & Outdoor Living in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

A fire feature is what stretches a Peterborough 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 the Contoocook river valley beneath Mount Monadnock — 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 large share of our New Hampshire 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.

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

Stone varies wildly pallet to pallet, so we select it ourselves. In Peterborough, where the local character runs to Federal and Victorian village houses alongside country estates, getting the color and cleft right matters more than the grade printed on the invoice.

A fire feature is a masonry structure, not decoration. We build on a footing carried below frost — which on stony till and ledge, with river alluvium in the valley floor 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 Victorian village houses alongside country estates it belongs to.