‘FROM INSIDE TO OUTSIDE’
How to create an outdoor room
If you are fortunate enough to have a terrace, a porch or some backyard space, spending a lot of time at home can be a much nicer experience. But how you design that space makes all the difference.
“A lot of times, you’ll see a beautiful garden with very organized furniture, which looks pretty, but when you actually go and sit, it’s out in the blazing sun,” said Scott Shrader, a landscape designer and the author of “The Art of Outdoor Living.”
If you want an outdoor space where you’ll be comfortable lingering for hours, he said, you need to address some basic questions: “Can you be protected from the sun? Can you put a drink down? Can you put your feet up?”
In short, you need to think of it as another room in your home — an outdoor room — and furnish it accordingly.
We asked landscape and interior designers for practical advice.
Choose your function
Start with an honest assessment of how you plan to use the space.
“You want to ask yourself, first and foremost, ‘What are we going to do there?’ ” said Charlotte Moss, a New York-based designer.
If the terrace will be a place for al fresco dining, you’ll need chairs that will allow people to sit upright and a table high enough to eat at — a very different arrangement of furniture than a space for casual lounging, where sofas and low tables may be more appropriate.
If your outdoor space is large, planning several different seating arrangements can accommodate multiple functions.
Tie it to the indoors
Look to your home’s interior-design scheme, Shrader said, to reinforce the connection between indoors and out.
“I always start inside the house and work my way out,” he said, with the goal of achieving “an effortless flow from inside to outside.”
In his West Hollywood, California, home, he said, the indoor floors are antiqued oak, so he installed chiseled stone pavers on the terrace outside, for a similar sense of age.
Your interior-design scheme can also inform material and color choices for outdoor furniture, accessories and even plantings, said Keith Williams, a partner at the Palm Beachbased landscape-architecture firm Nievera Williams and the author of “The Graphic Garden.”
For instance, he said, “if the house has soft, pale colors, we’ll tend to pick that up in the landscaping” through the choice of outdoor fabrics and flowers.
Create a floor
Demarcate the area of the outdoor room by changing the flooring material where the furniture will be placed.
For an outdoor dining table by a pool in Palm Beach, for instance, Williams designed an area where the ground looks almost like carpet, with diamond-shaped patches of synthetic grass.
Wesley Moon, a New York-based interior designer, rolled out an actual carpet at his apartment on Fire Island — an indooroutdoor rug from Dash &
Albert. “It gives that softness that really makes it feel like a room,” he said.
A section of wood decking could also be used to underpin a seating area, Moon noted, within a large expanse of pavers.
Moss, inspired by the gardens at Colonial Williamsburg, in Virginia, used crushed oyster shells for the floor of the outdoor dining area in her garden in East Hampton, New York.
Add a ceiling and walls
If there is no roof or overhang above your outdoor space, you can at least create the impression of a ceiling, Shrader said, both for the intimacy a sense of enclosure provides and for protection from the sun.
Putting a seating area beneath the canopy of a tree is one of his favorite techniques. “Often, I talk about trees as my outdoor ceilings,” he said.
In the absence of a tree, Shrader will sometimes add a trellis over a seating arrangement, which he might cover with willow or bamboo. An umbrella