Outdoor Living.

A pergola at Alterra is a built structure before it is a shade feature. We specify cedar where the warmth of the grain belongs against the architecture, steel where the proportion wants a thinner column and a longer span, and Lueders limestone or stucco-clad masonry columns where the house asks for something heavier at the base. Proportion follows the architecture of the house rather than a generic outdoor-room template — column spacing, header depth, rafter tail profile, and the line where the structure meets the wall all derive from the building itself. The structure is sited so that it reads as an extension of the house rather than a freestanding object dropped into the yard.

The details that keep a pergola in place for twenty years live below the surface. Footings are sized to DFW's shrink-swell clay, not to a generic spec, and the anchor hardware is stainless or hot-dip galvanized — never the zinc-plated plate that will rust through in a decade. After February 2021 we spec hardware with cold-weather fatigue in mind, especially on exposed roof connections and louvered-roof mechanisms. A complete pergola drawing set names footing depth, anchor detail, beam-to-post connection, rafter spacing, and — if the design includes a louvered or solid roof — the flashing detail where the structure meets the house. The same Principal who drew those details is the one on site when they are executed.

A terrace's usability starts with how the stone reads against the house and ends with how water leaves it. Most Alterra terraces are built in Lueders limestone on a properly prepared base — compacted sub-base, a reinforced slab where the span asks for it, mortared joints where the detail reads cleaner that way, dry-laid where the register calls for that. Pennsylvania bluestone shows up when the palette wants a cooler range. Post-Uri we spec freeze-hardened mortar on every exterior joint; the pre-2021 default is no longer on our terrace details. Grading pulls water away from the house at a visible but comfortable pitch — typically one-and-a-half to two percent — and directs it toward a planted edge that can actually absorb it rather than toward the neighbor's fence line.

Terrace dimension follows the table that will actually sit on it. A six-chair table is a different footprint from a ten, and a ten that has to coexist with a fire pit and a lounge zone is a different footprint still. We draw the furniture in plan at the design phase so that the terrace is sized to the life on it, not to a round number. Sightlines from the kitchen window and the primary interior rooms get deliberate — you are often looking at this terrace from inside the house as much as sitting on it — and the planting edge is staged so that the terrace reads as the ground extension of the living room rather than as a separate patio imposed on the lawn.

Lighting lives inside Outdoor Living at Alterra rather than as a separate service because the best lighting plans are drawn against the garden plan from the start, not bolted to a finished landscape after the fact. The discipline is restraint. Uplighting mature live oak and post oak canopies to draw the architecture of the tree at night; path lighting placed so that you can walk the garden safely but without reading the fixtures as a feature; moonlight-through-canopy downlighting from above where that is the effect the planting wants. Fixture color temperature stays in a narrow warm range — nothing cool, nothing colored. The garden after dark should read as the garden, not as a stage set.

Fixtures are specified in solid bronze or brass bodies with sealed LED modules — no plastic housings, no injection-molded bezels that go chalky in two summers. Mounting placement is drawn on the plan: tree-mounted uplights are strap-wrapped, not drilled; path lights are staked to a consistent height and angle across a run; step lights are integrated into the masonry rather than surface-applied. IP ratings match DFW exposure — full submersion rating at pool and water-feature fixtures, weather-sealed everywhere else. Decorative rope lights, colored accent lighting, and anything resembling holiday-programming fixtures are outside our specification list.

In February 2021, a share of the low-voltage fixture population across DFW failed in ways that changed our specification list. Freezing water entrapment inside poorly sealed fixture housings split bezels and corroded LED modules; transformers mounted in exposed locations cracked. We revised the specs afterward — sealed fixture housings rated for cold-weather fatigue, transformer enclosures sited on the leeward side of structures or inside sheltered microclimates, a documented drain protocol for any fixture with a water-intrusion risk. The specific brand picks are part of the Build phase handoff packet and evolve as suppliers respond; the principle holds.

Low-voltage transformers are sized to the fixture load with headroom for future additions. Control is typically astronomic-timer based, with scene programming for a small number of zones — garden at dusk, path and entry slightly later, off by a settled hour after midnight. Homeowner-facing zone labels are plain language, not circuit numbers. At handoff we walk the system with the client, hand over a documented zone map, and record the settings so that next year's reset or seasonal adjustment is a ten-minute conversation rather than an archaeology project.