How to Create an Incredible Al Fresco Living Space

How to Create an Incredible Al Fresco Living Space

It’s nice to have a garden. Scratch that – it’s great to have a garden. A spot here for the vegetables, a spot over there for the summerhouse, a spot right around there for a discrete composter and a spot right in front of the back doors for a well-manicured lawn. Perfect.

Then again, gardens have a lot of unused potential – especially in the UK, where we’re used to accommodating the unpredictable weather and making the most of those outdoor spaces on a few select days of the year.

Still, there are plenty of new ways to incorporate the outdoors into your main living space – rain or shine. Making it feel like another part of the home, rather than something entirely separate, is an excellent way of making the most of that area and taking advantage of the change of scenery nature has to offer.

How do you turn your garden into an extension of your home?

Something that proves so seductive about a holiday in some remote cottage or farmhouse in the Mediterranean is that sense of openness – that ability to wander in and out of the house and garden at leisure. Obviously, the weather will dictate your ability to treat the garden like ‘just another room’ to some extent but, when the clouds have dispersed and the ground has dried up, there’s no reason why you can’t take exactly the same approach anywhere in the world.

But it takes more than the French doors being flung open to embrace that way of life, or we’d all be doing it the Mediterranean way each summer.

There are a few key elements to keep in mind – comfort, convenience, and light. If we can master all three, we can start to feel like the garden is just as welcoming as the living room, the bedroom, or the kitchen.

Comfort

You’ll to take the same sort of approach to furnishing your garden like any other room, even if the arrangements are more temporary, and only here while the good weather lasts.

Garden furniture doesn’t need to be hard plastic or weathered wood – upholstering beautiful pieces in strong, durable fabric gives you much more scope to be creative, and furnish your garden with pieces you can really relax on. These days, performance fabrics are a lot more comfortable than the plastic cushion covers of family holidays gone by – and far more beautiful, too.

Making your garden more comfortable is about more than offering a few chairs you can really relax on. An outdoor dining table, big enough to cater to a large group a great, colourful mezze, will also make it far more likely that you and your guests will want to spend more time outdoors.

In the past, we’ve talked about unusual ways to decorate with rugs, and one of our favourites is using them to bridge the gap between the indoor and outdoor worlds. Place one across the threshold or, if you’re feeling confident in the weather, on the patio itself. Doing so creates a wonderfully bohemian feel that invites you to slip off the shoes, and enjoy the heat in comfort. 

Convenience

We want to make the outdoors inviting enough that we no longer see it as a ‘big deal’ to go outside – but, at the same time, we want the garden to be sufficiently outfitted that we don’t have to constantly go back inside for the things we need to enjoy ourselves.

One of the most convenient features you can add into the garden is a summerhouse – provided you know how to make it convenient, as well as beautiful. You can take a look at our top three tips for decorating the summerhouse for more inspiration.

Light

Something that instantly makes a garden look more inviting as the sun starts to go down? Light. It sounds obvious, but it’s easily overlooked. Most of us are apt to fall into a routine in the evenings and, if the garden doesn’t look instantly inviting, the idea of going out there and leaving the comforts of the living room is unlikely to come to us.

A well-lit garden is not only inviting, but also a work of art in its own right. We love the look created by a combination of outdoor lighting, and a warm, welcoming glow from the house’s decorative lights (and the summerhouse, if you have one).

Decorate the table with a few candles, and make sure that your outdoor lights are positioned in a way that highlights the organic shapes and textures of your plants. Uplighters placed in the wilder areas of the garden are true favourites, and really highlight the beauty of the natural world around you.