DCS takes pride in offering the widest possible range of pattern imprinted concrete designs and colours to enhance your driveway, patio, pool surround or any area where good quality paving is required.
Your Driveway
The pattern imprinted concrete gateway to your home.
Your Patio
A private area to entertain your friends and family.
Colours & Patterns
From pattern imprinted concrete designs which replicate stone, slate, cobbles, brick or even timber, Decorative Concrete Specialists offers a virtually limitless collection of patterns and colours, all personalised to your requirements.
Multi-blends of different colours are often used to customise the pattern imprinted concrete paving installation with your home and garden.
And due to the design flexibility of pattern imprinted concrete, we can use our creativity to ensure your paving installation blends nicely with almost any type of architecture or landscape, whether to offer a striking contrast or sympathetically blending in with the walls and finishes to your home.
Pattern imprinted concrete designs with contrasting patterns and colours can be created to designate different areas of usage such as a patio seating area, a barbeque area or a pool surround.
Our designers and surveyors will work with you to ensure that you get the perfect blend of functional and aesthetic qualities from your Decorative Concrete Specialists pattern imprinted concrete installation.
A second colour is often applied as part of the printing stage of the pattern imprinted concrete installation which enhances the appearance and realism of the chosen design.
Pattern imprinted concrete has huge advantages over natural stone pavements in that it is more cost effective, offers greater design flexibility, is more durable, has no weeds and when installed by the highly experienced team at Decorative Concrete Specialists, will enhance your home and garden perfectly.
Aesthetic Design Features
The designers and surveyors at Decorative Concrete Specialists have years of experience in ensuring that your pattern imprinted concrete driveway or patio is designed with thought.
We listen carefully to your requirements in terms of the size, shape and colour of your pattern imprinted concrete driveway and patio and then we add a special something.
At Decorative Concrete Specialists we take pride in designing your pattern imprinted concrete driveway or patio to be an integrated part of your home and garden. We do this by blending the hard landscaping of the driveway and patio areas with areas for soft landscaping such as flower beds against borders, planting areas for specimen trees and shrubs or feature gravel and shingle areas, perhaps with ornamental alpine plants.
Picture it – a pattern imprinted concrete driveway and patio from Decorative Concrete Specialists. The finishing touch to your home and garden.
Steps & Ramps
Decorative Concrete Specialists will form steps to your design or ours, whether square, rectangular or half moon shaped and with a matching or contrasting pattern imprinted concrete design sculptured into it.
Pre-cast concrete steps from a builder’s merchant would ruin a new Decorative Concrete Specialists pattern imprinted concrete driveway or patio area… so we don’t install them.
We can form shaped steps, in semi-firm concrete or a combination of steps and ramps to satisfy building regulations and disabled access requirements.
Non-slip surface treatments can also be applied to improve safety and a soldier course of cobble or brick effect border will be integrated into the pattern imprinted concrete design.
Drainage, Planning Permission and Building Regulations
Decorative Concrete Specialists always operates in accordance with best building practice and will not contravene planning permission rules, building regulations or local by-laws.
Generally speaking, planning permission and building regulations do not apply to the installation of pattern imprinted concrete paving to a front driveway or a patio. However, from 1st October 2008 new rules apply for householders wanting to pave over their front gardens.
You will not need planning permission if a new driveway uses permeable or porous surfacing which allows surface water to drain through, or if the rainwater on a non-porous surface is directed to a lawn or border to drain naturally.
If an existing porous surface of more than five square metres between the front of the property and the public highway is converted to a non-porous area such as pattern imprinted concrete, then planning permission is still not required providing surface rain water is directed to a lawn or border to drain naturally and not to the road or to existing mains drains.
Although building regulations do not generally apply to paving, we will need to ensure any alterations do not make access to your home any less satisfactory than it was before. Our designers and surveyors can advise you in your particular circumstances.
What is a Rain Garden?
Rain gardens are widely used in America and Decorative Concrete Specialists introduced them to the United Kingdom in response to the new rules introduced in 2008. Rain Gardens are depressions located along the edge of the pattern imprinted concrete driveway or patio at a low point. The depression can be filled with suitable plants to help slow run-off, or gravel or cobbles can be used as a decorative feature. See Aesthetic Design Features above.
To comply with these regulations Decorative Concrete Specialists will generally use a combination of strip drains, French drains, land drains and soakaways.
Nevertheless, every pattern imprinted concrete driveway and patio installation is different and our designers and surveyors can offer best advice during their visit to your home. Where planning permission is shown to be required, we can make an application on your behalf.
Manhole Covers in your Driveway or Patio
Where manholes have to be replaced as part of your pattern imprinted concrete driveway or patio installation, Decorative Concrete Specialists prefer to use recessed tray covers. These are available in several sizes and have either a 5 tonne or 10 tonne rating depending on the type of traffic the new surface is used for.
Recessed covers over manholes allow our installers to infill them with pattern imprinted concrete and colour it to match the area around the manhole. The pattern imprinted concrete recessed tray covers are much more attractive than a basic metal manhole cover and can be easily lifted for access and inspection of drains at a later date.
Concrete Crack Control Design
In certain conditions concrete can expand or contract slightly which can cause cracking of the surface. As part of the design process for all pattern imprinted concrete installations by Decorative Concrete Specialists, all of our designers and surveyors take seriously the threat of cracking and ‘design in’ a number of precautions.
The pattern imprinted concrete paving design can be arranged so as to disguise crack control joints and with clever design can often enhance the appearance. All crack control joints cut into pattern imprinted concrete driveways and patios installed by Decorative Concrete Specialists will have the crack control joints filled with mastic, which where possible will match closely the colour of the new driveway or patio.