Concrete Design

Contrary to what you may think, the best concrete designs do not shout “Look at me!” Rather, they subtly blend into the big picture without a lot of fanfare.

“There are different ways to draw attention to features without being demanding. You want people to walk on a job and notice the concrete as an enhanced feature of the overall project, but you don’t want them to gawk,” says Lee Levig, owner of Concrete Works in the San Francisco area. “If they immediately look down, you’ve failed.”

Doug Carlton, who heads up Carlton Concrete in Visalia, Calif., agrees. When he first started out and was trying to make a name for himself, he wanted each of his projects to stand out. “That’s a pitfall that many contractors fall into,” he says. “That’s not the point of it. You want it to blend in. The whole goal of a decorative sidewalk [for instance] is to enhance the natural look of the landscape with an organic piece of art.”

In the past, most people viewed a sidewalk as a whitish expanse of pavement that created a way to get from the street to the house, Carlton continues. Today, they still want it to serve the same purpose, but “Many want their walkways to be camouflaged to look like a natural surface, to look like it’s part of the landscape.”