Ways to Extend and Improve Your Home’s Outdoor Space

We all love spending time in our gardens, but in recent decades, the boundary between inside and outside living has become blurred, with many people building garden rooms, permanent barbecues and even outdoor kitchens.

Here are some of the ways you could extend your living space and make your garden even more appealing to you and your friends.

• Build a pergola with lots of creepers and even vines. This provides a nice shady retreat for you and your visitors, as well as a nice little habitat for various forms of wildlife.

• Patios that become hot, scorched and unbearable in the summer are a thing of the past. Make your patio an extension of the way your house already looks, and include planting beds and waterproof (and UV-proof for the optimists) furniture. Even if you’re part-lizard you’ll need some sort of respite from the sun, so get some fast-growing bamboo and train it over a trellis, or get a retractable awning.

• Think about an outdoor kitchen if you like eating outdoors. Many of us have a barbecue, but if you’re a frequent griller, you must be sick of being rained off, or maybe you fantasise about holding a barbie in the autumn or winter. An outdoor kitchen, complete with hygienic worktop, sink and cold storage, will make your life much easier.

• If you create any sort of outdoor room, you’ll need a sense of privacy and enclosure. Fences are great for regular gardens, but for something special, try lattices and landscaping to block out the neighbours – or at the very least their houses.

• Furnishings for outdoor spaces and outdoor rooms have developed a bit since cane and rattan, too. You can get cast iron, aluminium or wooden chairs and tables. You can get upholstery that’s made from modern fabrics specially developed to be rain, mould and sun-proof. Most of this modern outdoor furniture doesn’t even look especially outdoorsy – you could just as easily see it inside a house.

• This style extends to floor and table lamps, so you don’t have to rely on security lights and weak candles to light up your nights anymore!

• Of course if you’re talking about outdoor luxury then you can’t ignore the hot tub or spa. Don’t just plonk it anywhere, though. You need to think about how private you want it to be, as well as how shaded from the sun.

• If you don’t get much sun, you can still have a hot tub, but you might do better with one designed by Arctic Spas for the colder climes. You also need to leave enough room around it so that you can walk past it. The average round hot tub is six feet in diameter and needs around 30 square feet of clearance. If it’s rectangular, you’ll need 48 square feet at least. Don’t expect to put it on your decking, though! Water is heavy, and your full hot tub will weigh at least two tons, so it’ll need its own foundations.

• The really modern outdoor space has a fireplace or fire pit. Fire is always a focal point and helps you to define and divide space. Fire pits can be built-in (i.e. brick) or moveable, and the best thing about them is that they mean you can carry on partying into the winter!