Creating a dynamic, social environment in your patio and garden can be challenging. But improving your space can make outdoor parties a lot more enjoyable, and can hugely increase the usable square footage of your house. If you find yourself disconnected from the people at your party, or feel that your outdoor space just isn’t suited for entertaining and social, check out these tips and set up your patio for entertaining!
Outdoor parties are all about cheerful guests, happy times, great music, and beautiful sunsets. A great time can be had with some plastic furniture, cheap beer, and some hot dogs. Equally, a great time can be had with hand-crafted cocktails, stunning modern furniture, and a home cooked meal with vegetables from the garden.
Set Up Your Patio for Entertaining
Here are seven tips to prime your patio for the summer! Keep these in mind while you get your patio and garden area ready for the season, and your outdoor gatherings will be the talk of the town.
1. Fix the Indoor/Outdoor Flow
By keeping the flow from the indoors to the outdoors as natural as possible, you can improve the circulation between your indoor space and outdoor space. Better connection between indoors and outdoors will make entertaining more natural. Those who are inside will be able to easily see outside, and vice versa.
Also, those working in the kitchen will be able to interact with guests outside, which is always a good thing.
This house, by Horst Architects, is a stunning example of a folding wall of glass. We especially love how the same flooring continues from the indoors to the outdoors, further blurring the barrier between indoors and outdoors.
Of course, these open wall systems cost a fortune, but the separation between indoor and outdoor is a great place to invest, as it is a key area of the house.
2. Energize Your Space with Color
Don’t be afraid to decorate with color on the patio. If you have a backdrop of several different types of plants, you can use your garden flower colors for patio color inspiration, but you don’t need to. You can also draw from pillows, planter pots, outdoor rugs, etc.
This wonderful patio conversation area uses a simple color palette, with the striking cantilever umbrella with its cheerful orange canvas taking center stage. The cantilever design of the umbrella keeps the umbrella pole comfortably out of the way of socialization.
3. Use Your Retaining Walls as Benches or Planters
If your garden or patio space has retaining walls, or needs retaining walls, then these are natural targets for planting spaces. Building planters into the retaining walls brings the plants above the ground space, and creates a tiered effect that can both conceal views and create new views.
These planters, coupled with bench seating, help to create nature-bound quiet spaces, ideal for reading or warm conversation.
4. Use Accent Lighting To Liven the Space
It used to be that setting up elegant outdoor lighting was a major pain. You needed an electrician, needed trenches to be dug through your lawn, etc. It was expensive and a lot of work. The rapid fall in price of solar cells has made set-and-forget solar lighting super easy, and effective!
Careful use of accent lighting will complete the mood for your outdoor space. String lights can work great, but typically you want to stick to large bulb, clear (or frosted) glass (or edison-style bulbs) for your outdoor string lights. These string lights say “beautiful fun times ahead” rather than “Christmas is here”.
Also, consider using some hanging solar lanterns for decoration. These can bring the eye upward, and can be really great set-and-forget outdoor lighting.
5. Create Multiple Zones For Entertaining
When organizing your patio space, you want to have multiple areas for entertaining, with different features and uses. This back yard space, with its tiered deck and pergola-covered outdoor fireplace area, has a variety of areas to play, converse, eat, and relax.
Some areas more casual than others, and are likely to get more use at different times of day. Pay attention to the way the light, sound, and nature works in your patio area over the course of the day. Wind chimes and bird feeders can bring pleasing sounds, so don’t neglect them.
Also, think about what spaces feel open, and what spaces feel closed off and sheltered.
6. Use Accent Lighting for Orientation
With creative use of solar spot lights and other gentle accent lighting, you can identify points of interest and areas to gather within your garden and patio space. Illuminating plants is an excellent strategy, but you can use solar lighting to easily provide accent lighting to most any feature of your garden.
These lights are generally fairly inexpensive, and are set-and-forget, so they’re very easy to work with.
7. Keep Storage Areas in Mind
It’s easy to forget storage, since typically people don’t want to see it. But just like the idea that many closets make a tidy home, many storage areas make a beautiful patio space. If you have clutter lying about, or if you need to run inside to get every little item while your guests wait on the patio, things aren’t quite right.
Consider investing in a few deck boxes for storage (we love the Suncast deck box shown above!), or perhaps a horizontal storage shed.
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