Creating an Outdoor Room at your House

Outdoor rooms are a big trend in design right now. An outdoor room can expand the living space of your home for many months of the year. An outdoor room is also more affordable than an enclosed addition.

Planning an outdoor room requires consideration of a number of design issues. The way you chose to use your outdoor room determines its size and orientation.


• Do you want to cook outside? On charcoal or gas? Built in or movable? Wet or dry sink? Refrigerator? Outdoor kitchens can be simple and complex.


• What about eating outside? How many people would you like to have sit down at a table?


• Should the outdoor living space incorporate a “living room” with space for couches, comfortable chairs and coffee tables?


• How do you feel about sun and shade? Options to limit sun include full roofs, open pergola style patio covers, awnings, and trees.

The second part of outdoor room design involves design detail. Carefully considered steps to navigate the inevitable changes in level from the door to the outdoor space and beyond make an enormous impact on the success of an outdoor room. Low seating walls create enclosure while preserving a sense of openness; taller screening walls and plantings can obscure less desirable views. Well placed special amenities like fountains and fire features create special gathering spaces in the outdoor living space.

Materials selection determines the character of the space. Matching the character of the materials outside the house is fairly typical, but complete contrast can work well too. Brick and stone are rustic and historical in character. Stained concrete, concrete pavers and metal finishes create a more contemporary feel.

Spatial Concepts: Elevation Changes

We all spend our days in a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces…our houses, places of work, stores, malls, churches, parks, highways, our gardens. Yet, most of us have a very limited vocabulary for talking about what makes some places amazing and others forgettable, if not outright unpleasant. How can we communicate about place better? How can we create better, more comfortable, more meaningful spaces?

Spatial concepts should be easily accessible.  With the help of Sacajawea, Princess Louise and their friends in Design Land, we can compare their perceptions to real life occurrences in nature, in architecture, and in the built landscape to help us figure out what makes the best space. We’ll start this series with exploring the concept of elevation change.

Here’s Sacajawea….standing by herself in Design Land. But, standing on the saucer…an elevated plane...her whole perspective changes. Varying the plane alters our perspective of a space.

Look at my view of Sipi Falls in Eastern Uganda…and contemplate David’s view, standing on a rock outcropping higher up.

Think about how different planes, although visually connected, define the shopping mezzanine and the waiting area at Heathrow airport.

In the landscape ISD designed, consider how we differentiated the house, the dining room and the living room of this outdoor space with changes in elevation. The spaces are separated from the others by just one step.  The transitions are comfortable, while accommodating the slope.  Each space provides independant function, yet flows to the next gracefully.

Manipulating planes and vertical forms successfully, and creating meaningful spaces present challenges in the landscape because there’s always the context of what’s already there. The landscape is rarely a blank slate. Sites can be flat, can present elevation changes in multiple directions, or have hills in awkward locations.

Resolving elevation and sculpting the land successfully is one of the hallmarks of quality landscape design. Working with talented designers (like us at Ivy Street Design) can take this potential challenge and create a space that feels like it is meant to be.