The fundamental concept of indoor-outdoor living is bringing the outside in and vice-versa. This is often accomplished by maintaining key design elements in both your home and backyard while maximizing the view of your outdoor spaces. Creating a seamless indoor-outdoor living design is a great way to make a small space feel bigger, flood your home with mood-enhancing natural light and let in the natural beauty of your home’s outdoor spaces.
1. Windows and Doors Are Key
Homeowners seeking to maximize their indoor-outdoor living design opportunities will want to minimize solid exterior walls that face their backyard or whichever outdoor space they want to incorporate with their indoor space. This requires features like glass walls or large windows, sliding glass doors, bi-fold and stacking doors, or French doors with large glass panes. The less the view from inside your home is obstructed by walls the better. Ideally, you want to create a visual and spatial appearance of the backyard being just steps away from the couch.
Some of the most common features Procraft installs to enhance indoor-outdoor living include custom windows, bifold exterior doors, French doors, stacking doors, double sliders and other types of custom doors. Whether you’re interested in making massive modifications to create your ideal indoor-outdoor living space or you just want to make a few tweaks to your home’s architecture and design to promote a seamless flow between inside and outside, our window and door experts can help.
Call Procraft at (206) 361-5121 to schedule a free estimate and design consultation to get started.
2. Ceiling Style and Lighting
Maintaining the same ceiling style and lighting elements in your living room and your backyard patio will create the illusion that it’s one big, continuous space. For example, if you have wood paneled ceilings or exposed beams with recessed lighting in your living room that opens out onto the porch, continue the exact same ceiling and lighting design on the porch as well.
3. Indoor-Outdoor Flooring Options
Another common design element that can be maintained both inside and on the patio in the backyard is flooring style, especially when it’s indoor-outdoor use tile. If you maintain the same tile type and pattern, it will appear as if your backyard patio is simply an extension of your living room.
Using this style of flooring outdoors can be especially useful for people who have smaller homesites, as the more flooring you put down the more usable space, you’ll have in your limited backyard area.
There are actually an array of potential flooring design options that can provide a continuous indoor-outdoor flooring feel, even if you have wood floors in your home.
4. Complimentary Color Palettes
Color palette is another powerful tool that can help you foster a blended indoor-outdoor living experience. If your living room furniture has a specific color palette, use the same one or a complementary palette for your outdoor furniture.
5. Hedge Screens or Other Privacy Enhancing, Wall-Like Features
6. Less-Is-More Design
One popular trend in indoor-outdoor design is the less-is-more approach. Too much ornamentation or haphazard plant variation and placement has the potential to detract from the linear progression of indoor to outdoor design elements. In some cases, a more minimalist approach to backyard landscaping and hardscaping design will result in a greater emphasis on the indoor-outdoor living atmosphere itself.
If you’re ready to embrace indoor-outdoor living, get started by calling Procraft today at (206) 361-5121.
