Raised Patio Against the House: Avoiding a Bridged Damp Course
A raised patio hard against the house, level with the back door and with no step to catch a foot or a wheel, is one of the most common briefs I hear from clients, and it's not a silly one. In decades of designing gardens across Kent and East Sussex, I've learned it makes a garden feel like part of the house rather than something you step down into, and in a smaller garden particularly, it can make the whole space feel bigger and more connected.
The difficulty is that this ambition runs straight into a line on the house most people have never noticed: the damp proof course. Get the relationship between the two wrong and a lovely new patio can turn into a damp patch on an internal wall a year or two later. In this piece I'll explain what the damp proof course does, what bridging it actually means, and the several proper ways a raised or level patio can be designed without putting your walls at risk.





































































































