Brick Driveway Detail

A couple of days ago I posted on Appreciation of Stone #26, and left a link to where there were more images in my Fotki folder for this job. There was a comment about the brick detail for the drive and after reading that I decided to delve into that aspect of the job a little closer.

[Parking Court during construction of project.]
The normal design/install for the edge would be to double band the soldiers*, lay in the field and then add restraint, or restraint then field-it’s a personal choice. Anyway back to the soldiers.

We were looking for something a little different here for a few valid reasons:

• A way to alert the driver they were near the edge of the paving, especially helpful for those backing in.
• The alert would save folks from running into the boxwood hedge in the parking court.
• The creation of that shadow line, a small thing . . . but those small details add up.
• Aesthetically the raised course of soldiers adds that little something.
• Plus; I found out, it channels run-off to the drains.

Detail of the edge, and a look at detail where drive meets parking court. Gives you a pretty good idea of the work the contractor and his guys did to create something that really had some great visual interest. Something to look back at and say, “yeah, we did that“.

This house can best be described as a “Legacy House“, it’s a term I picked up a couple of years ago at a Stone Foundation Symposium. A somewhat famous architect was describing this $10million dollar house he was building and talking about how it would last a couple of hundred years, as opposed to most commercial structures which have a planned obsolescence of 25 years or so.

This phrase “Legacy House” has always stuck with me. So whenever I work on anything like this house I hope to put forth great effort in using good materials, well-designed, and correctly installed as my part of the project.

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*Soldiers: Soldier(s);[soldier course(s)] is a term(s) used to describe the outside banding for a paving project; whether it be brick, stone, or concrete[pavers, poured slab]. So the Soldier course(s) would hold the field(the large paved space inside the soldiers) together. This field can be laid in several different types of patterns. But that is another post.