Southlake, Texas Est. 2012
We build the back. Outdoor kitchens, pavilions, stone and the ground under all of it, for houses in Southlake, Colleyville and Westlake where the patio faces due west and July starts in May.
Kitchens start at $22,000. Every price range we quote is published further down this page, which is more than you will get from anyone else on Southlake Boulevard.
The planner
This is a real measured plan, not a picture. Appliances sit to scale inside their cutouts, the dimensions are the ones our fabricator templates from, and if what you picked will not fit the run you chose, the drawing tells you so instead of quietly overlapping.
Budget band, turnkey
$26,800 to $33,500
Masonry, veneer, counter fabrication and install, appliances, gas, electrical, structure and the pad under it. Southlake permit fees included. This is an estimate built from published unit rates, not a quote.
Hardscape
What holds it up, drains around it and keeps it from moving is the work. On Cross Timbers ground you have sandy loam over clay over limestone, sometimes all three inside twenty feet, and the base is where projects quietly fail three years later.
01
Six inches of compacted base, one inch of bedding sand, and polymeric joint sand swept twice. We compact in three lifts and test with a plate, not a boot. Travertine, porcelain pavers, Pennsylvania flagstone, and broom or exposed aggregate concrete when the budget says so.
$22 to $46 per sq ft
02
Seat walls at 18 inches with a stone cap wide enough to actually sit on. Retaining over 4 feet gets engineered and stamped, because Southlake will ask and because the ones that fail are always the ones that skipped it. Geogrid, drainage stone and a real perforated drain behind every wall we build.
$185 to $260 per linear ft, seat wall
03
Gas fire pits plumbed to the meter with a key valve where you can reach it in the dark, not behind the wall. Wood burning fireplaces get a real footing, a flue that drafts, and a hearth deep enough to meet code. We have rebuilt four in this town that smoked because nobody sized the throat.
$3,800 to $32,000
04
Every project gets a drainage plan whether you asked for one or not. Surface grade first, then channel drains at the slab edge, then French drain only if it earns its place. Nothing discharges toward your neighbor's lot, which is both neighborly and the law in Tarrant County.
$2,600 to $14,000
Built for this climate
A beautiful patio you cannot stand on between May and September is an expensive photograph. These are the three things that actually change that, and the first one is not the one people expect.
On a 100 degree Southlake afternoon in full sun, the air temperature is the least interesting number in your backyard. This is what the paving under it reads, measured with an infrared thermometer at four in the afternoon in July. The difference between the top and the bottom of this table is the difference between barefoot and not.
| Surface | Reads at 4pm | Solar index | Installed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ivory travertine | 105 °F | 78 | $32 to $46 |
| Silver travertine | 112 °F | 70 | $30 to $44 |
| Light porcelain paver | 120 °F | 62 | $34 to $48 |
| Broom finish concrete | 135 °F | 38 | $14 to $22 |
| Buff flagstone | 138 °F | 34 | $28 to $40 |
| Charcoal concrete paver | 155 °F | 14 | $24 to $34 |
| Dark composite decking | 158 °F | 11 | $38 to $60 |
Installed cost is per square foot on a prepared base. Solar reflectance index is the published figure for the material class, not a lab test of your specific slab. The practical rule in this county: anything below about 40 will burn a dog's pads in July.
Almost every backyard we work in faces west or southwest, which means the sun is on your patio from three in the afternoon until it sets after half past eight in July. That is exactly the window you want to be out there.
A pergola with rafters running north to south throws a shadow that sweeps across the patio through the afternoon and gives you roughly 55 percent cover at four o'clock. Run those same rafters east to west and the shadow sits still and misses you. It is the same lumber and the same money, and one of them works.
After five o'clock, when the sun is low and coming in sideways, nothing open stops it. Only a solid roof with a deep overhang on the west face does, which is why we push people toward a pavilion when the orientation is bad, even though it costs three times as much.
July sun on a west facing Southlake patio
Southlake buys its water from Fort Worth and runs twice weekly watering from April through October in a normal year, less in a dry one. Everything we specify around a patio has to look intentional on that schedule, in reflected heat coming off the stone, in ground that is sandy on top and clay underneath. These eight do. We plant them in beds cut back at least 18 inches from the slab so the roots are not cooking against it.
Southlake also has a tree preservation ordinance. If your project comes within the critical root zone of a protected tree, and in a Timarron or Shady Oaks backyard it usually does, that changes the base, the equipment we bring in and sometimes the footprint. We check it before we price it, not after.
Published ranges, 2026
Real ranges for northeast Tarrant County, installed, including base prep, permit and cleanup. Where a project lands inside its range is mostly about access, grade and how much stone is on the vertical faces. Kitchen ranges do not include a roof over them, because a structure is its own project with its own footing, and it is priced below.
Three we built
Final numbers, not contract numbers, including the change orders. Published with each owner's permission.
Twenty two feet of L run with a 36 inch grill, side burner, sink and refrigerator, leathered quartzite counters, and a cedar pergola stained to match the house trim. Six hundred and forty square feet of silver travertine set on a new slab, with a channel drain at the house wall because the original patio had been sheeting water at the foundation for nine years.
A protected post oak sat eleven feet off the back corner. Its critical root zone took two feet off the run and moved the pergola footing to a pier and beam detail dug by hand. That decision cost about $4,100 and saved a tree that is older than the neighborhood.
Twenty six feet of U run with a 42 inch grill, gas pizza oven, ice maker, two refrigerator drawers and a trash pullout. Board formed concrete counters cast on site. Eighteen by twenty four gabled pavilion with stained tongue and groove, two fans, and a 24 inch overhang on the west face that is the entire reason the family eats out there in August.
The gas load came to 118,000 BTU with the meter 140 feet away on the far side of the house, which put the branch at one inch pipe and required a meter upgrade from Atmos. That took five weeks of the sixteen and none of it was construction.
Sixteen feet, straight, against an existing fence line. A 36 inch grill, a sink, storage, and nothing else, with board formed concrete counters and a bar overhang carrying four stools. Three hundred and eighty square feet of charcoal paver patio and a gas fire pit set eleven feet off the counter so the two spaces read as separate rooms.
We talked them out of a pergola. The patio faces north east, it is shaded by the neighbor's canopy from four o'clock, and the eleven thousand dollars went into better stone and real lighting instead.
Start here
Screenshot it and text it to the number below, or call and read us the readout. We will tell you within about ten minutes on the phone whether the budget band you saw is going to hold on your particular lot.