Almost every garden has one. But the humble patio often ends up being a boring square of concrete, or just a thoroughfare from house to garden. Instead just imagine a beautiful patio where you can sit and relax on a summer’s evening with a glass of wine; a patio that’s a well-planned garden design feature, useful, and great to look at.

The following guide aims to give you some ideas and inspiration for creating the perfect patio. Much of the advice can be applied to either creating a new patio from scratch, or giving a mature patio a facelift.

Firstly think about the size of your patio. It needs to be spacious enough to be practical, but without dominating the rest of the garden. You can work out how much patio you’ll need by simply thinking about how you intend to use the space. So if you’ve got a 14 seat outdoor dining table you need to think bigger. If it’s just the two of you, a more modest size patio may do.

The size of the patio also needs to be in proportion to the house and garden. A small terraced garden may only tolerate a patio a few metres in size, whereas a larger plot could comfortably accommodate a series of connecting patio areas.

A patio doesn’t always have to be right outside the back door. Maybe there’s a nicer view from the far end of your garden, or a natural suntrap you’d like to take advantage of. You could even create two patio areas in the garden for morning and evening use, connected by a pathway.

Once you’ve planned your patio, it’s time to build it. There’s a huge choice of landscaping products available from concrete paving to imitation railway sleepers. One material that’s growing in popularity and reducing in price is natural stone paving. It can add character and warmth to a patio, with an increasing choice of unusual and exotic products available from around the world. For example the stone supplier Pavestone now offers ten different colours of natural sandstone, luxurious Turkish Travertine paving and even Mongolian slate.

Most paving suppliers provide useful laying guide’s for their products and it’s well worth taking the time to create an interesting pattern with your paving. The most commonly effective layout is a random pattern created from three to four different sizes of slab. A simple uniform pattern of equal sized paving may suit a smaller Mediterranean style terrace. For extra interest line up your patio at a 45-degree angle to the house, which also then creates opportunities to overlap more than one area of paving to create an eye-catching larger patio.

In a larger patio two contrasting materials can be used, such as stone paving divided into sections with lines of antique red bricks. Gaps in paving can be left, and filled with decorative gravel and hardwearing groundcover plants such as fragrant Corsican Mint, Mentha reqeienii, thyme or the pretty daisy-like Erigeron karkvinskianus.

For overhead shade and privacy you can add a wooden pergola to your patio which is useful if your garden is overlooked, on a new housing development for example. Grow climbers such as Passion Flower or Clematis up and over the woodwork, or you can run a pergola over a patio running along the rear of the house to create the effect of a loggia.

Then it’s time to look at the all-important finishing touches and accessories. Garden lighting can help extend use of your patio right into the evening and can also become a design feature in it’s own right. You can install wall mounted lights, discreet up-lighters hidden in planting or free standing bollard style lights in a range of contemporary materials such as wood, granite, stainless steel and even distressed cast iron.

For the ultimate in outdoor entertainment, you can bring music to your patio to create mood and atmosphere. Outdoor speakers are weatherproof and can be fixed to the wall or hidden discretely in landscaping. Some products, like the new 151 environmental speakers from Bose, can even be sprayed with car paints to match your garden colour scheme and blend into the background.

The most common accessory on any patio is the container plant, with artfully arranged groups of planted pots adding life and colour. Create an eclectic look by planting a mixture of metal, wood and terracotta containers, or even an old ceramic kitchen sink.

Create a more elegant effect by planting glazed containers with delicate ferns and grasses, or eye-catching ornamental specimens like the purple-red Acer palmatum ‘Bloodgold’, beautifully shaped Kilmarnock Willow, Salix caprea ‘Kilmarnock’, or the less hardy olive tree, Olea europaea.

Your patio container plants can have a practical purpose too. By growing a collection of culinary herbs such as mint, coriander, thyme, parsley and chive grown in pots on the patio, you’ve always got fresh seasoning close at hand.