Designs With Round Pavers

Flower Power

• Place one textured or different colored round paver in the center of five or six plain pavers of a different color to make a flower. Repeat the design as many times as necessary to make the size space you need. This technique introduces a 1960s retro feel to your patio.

Scallop or Fan Design

• This overall design looks like a brick doily with scalloped edging. Use one round terracotta-colored paver and surround it with bricks to make a larger circle. Border the bricks with more round pavers spaced about as far apart as two brick lengths, then surround those with a semicircle of bricks around each one, and so on. Try different combinations of colors and materials for interesting fan-style effects. The use of brick makes this a good combination landscaping around a more formal home of same-style brick.

Bubbles

• Pavers come in different sizes as well as colors and textures. You can take advantage of that to make a bubblelike display for an outdoor sitting area or patio by staggering large, medium and small, blue, white or gray pavers randomly. Let “bubbles” trail out to make paths. This would look especially effective in a bed of blue glass pebbles to simulate water. You can buy the polished glass “jellybeans” or tumbled glass stones from a landscaping glass supplier.

Sunburst

• Create lines of progressively smaller, round pavers radiating from a central -- preferably round patio -- to make a sunburst design. Color the pavers with warm reds, oranges and yellows in an outdoor concrete stain to heighten the visual appearance. Use darkest colors near the patio -- which you should also stain the deepest color -- and gradually lighten to pale yellow at the farthest point. This is a very festive design that works best with a southwestern architecture.

Ring Around the Round Stuff

• Instead of the usual bricks and rectangular pavers to spoil the round aesthetic of the circular fire pit, border the outside with a ring of round red pavers set in black pumice-stone to match the stone in your fire pit. The black and red color-combo looks positively volcanic. Ring your pool the same way, but set gray or white pavers in white gravel or blue glass pebbles. For a round flower bed, use pebble-textured pavers set in small river pebbles, grass or low-growing ground cover. Spiral outward from the ring for a house-to-fire-pit or pool walkway.