Garden Seating and Backyard Design
For some strange reason, when we count the rooms in our houses, we only look inside, and we forget that there is one more room outside, namely the garden. There are numerous ways in which the living space in the garden may be structured and decorated in order to turn it into a good alternative to the living room. And if you want to get the most out of that space, and make it easier to enjoy your garden for longer periods of time, you may start thinking of an appropriate seating arrangement as well as the garden’s design.
The interior design of the exterior
In the vast majority of cases, all you will probably find in somebody’s garden is a plastic table, a few plastic chairs, a barbecue grid, and perhaps a hammock for a good day. Yet, the garden could be something more or better than just a barbecue area or a place to have a five o’clock cup in the summer.
There are three basic strategies you could apply to your garden’s decoration and design, and each of them would need a different type of furniture as well.
- If you prefer camping or spending time in the countryside every time you have a chance, you may as well let nature come to you instead. You could turn your garden into the Garden of Eden where you will easily forget the city and even the modern residential compound of your house. Obviously, a post-modernistic sectional sofa simply defeats the purpose in such a case; some light wicker armchairs would do a better job.
- Alternatively, you can use all there is in your garden to turn it into a magic fairytale courtyard. Everything, from the type of seating place to the choice of lighting, ornaments, and flowers, would depend on the leitmotif of the tale the moment the power of your imagination had been unleashed.
- Finally, if you are quite happy to stay indoors most of the time, you could take your room out into the open air and literally transform your garden into a living room. Creating the design, the decor, and the style of the garden, and shopping for decorations and furniture would, in this case, resemble what you had already done inside the house some time ago.
However, before we even begin with any of the three strategies, we should remind ourselves of one additional factor to consider, which is practically irrelevant to the interior design of the house, namely the weather.
The weather conditions
There are some extremely fortunate places on the planet where the weather is not an issue at all, and should you happen to reside in one of them, this section of the article may easily be skipped. As for the rest of us, the topic of climate could be qualified more realistically as a question of protection from the weather.
Incidentally, it is particularly relevant to your choice of a seating piece that you may place in your garden. Fortunately, modern outdoor furniture shops offer so many options that choosing the most appropriate one should not pose a problem, provided we have worked out precisely what we are looking for.
And when we consider various ways of hiding from the weather conditions, we should think of four directions in which we might have to protect ourselves from them.
Protection from above
Excessive and/or unpleasant precipitation is our basic problem in this case, and there are several practical solutions to the problem. Your shed could be transformed into a spacious alcove, for example, or you may choose to roof the patio area and turn it into a veranda. Alternatively, you might want to consider the possibility of constructing a cozy gazebo in a corner of the garden. But whatever you eventually choose to do, it will definitely make no difference to your choice of a sofa as the latter will be covered anyway.
Protection from below
You are not going to enjoy your time in the garden if you have to step out into the mud or cold wet grass every time. And you may, of course, forget about any kind of furniture lasting there longer than one season. Covering the ground with some wooden planks might help a lot though, and when you start shopping for a couch, you bay look at the ones with slightly longer legs or base.
Horizontal protection
This is particularly important if you live in a rainy and windy area, where the weather troubles you from the sides. Naturally, your canopy, or anything else for that matter, is not going to make a big difference, save for the walls around. It may be the actual walls around the house that are high enough to shield you from the elements, but even that will probably not help you very much if your garden happens to be quite large too. In case it is, you might have to return to the options of a closed gazebo or a transformed shed.
Protection from within
Finally, while thinking of various ways of defending your outdoor furniture from the weather’s attacks on all sides, you may also shop for chairs and sofas made of materials that more appropriate for the weather in your region. Depending on whether you live in a cold and rainy or a dry and extremely sunny country, you will have to take different precautions, and learn to accept that some materials and fabrics will forever be out of the question for your garden. Surprisingly, leather seems to be quite a resilient material, and it can withstand a lot, except for the direct scourging sunlight.
Summary
Your house may be larger than what hides inside, and it is possible to use the yard area more constructively and creatively which happens in the vast majority of cases. There will be lots of limitations imposed by the weather conditions, the size and the shape of your garden, and by your budget too. On the other hand, there will be lots of options to choose from as well. With the right initiative and a bit of creative thinking, therefore, there will be few conditions that make it impossible to transform your backyard into a genuine Garden of Eden.
