Picking a retaining wall stone is fun and challenging. Our backyard is terraced with what I would call “regional” rocks. It also has this unfortunate kitty-corner (or katty-corner for some) slope that isn’t the easiest to work with. We also had some areas of the existing retaining wall that were failing.
After multiple trips to landscape supply yards, pouring through online catalogs, and some disappointing price quotes, we chose the Belgard Weston.
TIP: Determine if your wall is free-standing, ornamental, or serving as an actual retaining wall. If you have conditions such as needing a wall over a few feet in height or poor soil and drainage conditions, your choice in wall materials is going to shrink!
With our backyard, we needed a wall that was more than a few feet tall. The challenges we faced is that we were going to hold back glacial till (clay), which drains poorly and tends to expand and contract a lot and it would be nearly 4 feet in some areas. This limited our retaining wall material choices significantly.
Once we honed in on needing a true retaining wall, our material choice was limited by what was regionally available. A particular Techno-Block wall that we fell in love with was only sourced by one vendor and was nearly 3 times the cost of a Belgard wall.
Belgard Weston Stone Rio Untumbled
How to Select Caps for the Wall
Make sure to review the width of your brick and the options for it. One challenge we had is that the Weston uses the same brick as the cap, but turns it. It’s a busy look when you have a long stretch of wall like we do (nearly 38 feet). We ended up going with the Belgard Melville Cap in Rio – it’s 24 inches long which gave us good coverage of the wall bricks. However, the 12-inch width meant we needed to trim each cap because the Belgard Weston is only 8 inches wide. This would potentially be a challenge on long runs of free standing walls where both front and back need to look good.
Good luck selecting your wall brick and color! Check out our Pavilion and Fire Pit projects for more pictures on how the Belgard Weston Brick and Melville Cap wall turned out – we think it looks pretty sweet!
