Steps & Stairs in Sunapee, New Hampshire.

Designers keep sending us Upper Valley 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.

A job in Sunapee is a few weeks of trucks, machines, and people in your yard. We plan staging and protection before day one — drive plates, root-zone protection, a defined material area — and leave the site clean each evening rather than at the end.

Steps heave before anything else because they concentrate load on a small footprint. Set on granite ledge and stony till, shallow on the lakeside grades, that risk is real — so we excavate below frost, compact a structural base, and bed each tread so it cannot rock, settle, or drift out of line through the winter.

Solid granite treads, stacked bluestone, or dry-set fieldstone risers each get a different build sequence, matched to the shingled lake houses, boathouses, and summer estates of the house they serve.

Lake Sunapee’s shoreland protection and steep lake lots make terracing and anchored retaining the core of the work — built into the ledge rather than onto it.

Steps rarely exist alone — we tie them into the walkway, wall, and terrace they connect, in Sunapee Harbor, Georges Mills, and Burkehaven and across Sunapee, so the stair reads as part of the landscape rather than a separate purchase.

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