Extend Your Living Space with an Updated Outdoor Room

Southerners are known to savor summer days outside in the fresh air, and there’s no better way to enjoy the season than to extend your living space outdoors. Whether it’s entertaining friends at a casual dinner party or simply relaxing poolside with a good book, being outdoors can make everyday living feel as relaxed and special as a luxury vacation.

                Creating beautiful outdoor rooms that are extensions of a home’s interior space has become more and more popular along the Southeast coast, where we live and play outdoors almost 10 months out of the year. In fact, outdoor living has become so popular that many homeowners are starting to spend just as much time planning their outdoor rooms as they spend planning the interiors of their homes. Instead of the typical outdoor table and chairs placed on the patio next to the pool, homeowners are bringing all the luxury comforts of indoor living outside.

                Not only are these outdoor living rooms becomes extensions, but they are becoming as functional as the interior rooms of a home. Distinct outdoor living rooms, dining rooms and poolside lounge rooms are furnished accordingly with luxury design details and high-quality fabrics that give the look and feel of permanent rooms.

                “Traditionally dining sets were the main purchases for the outdoor living space,” said Barbara Hughes of The Patio Place in Savannah. “Within the past three years, we have seen this change to conversational areas and living room settings. Deep seating is the way consumers are going, and they are definitely going for more color than before.”

                Accessorizing is also a big design trend in outdoor living, and you can make the outdoor patio space unique by decorating and accessorizing just as you would an interior room of the house. Pillows, rugs, rolling bar carts, dinnerware, linens and lanterns are other common accessories that add individual style as well as functionality to each outdoor space, creating the feeling of a real room. A vintage chandelier suspended from a tree branch or roof cover above turns an outdoor meal into an occasion.

                You can create an outdoor patio space that’s simply charming or elaborately elegant with all the latest technology. All it takes is a little imagination and inspiration – and the outdoor possibilities are limitless.