Improve Your View: How Landscaping Affects Your Indoor Living Space

Mar 06 2016

Improve Your View: How Landscaping Affects Your Indoor Living Space

At its best, the landscape surrounding a home is an extension of the interior living space.  Ideally windows frame views out to the landscape beyond that compliment indoor spaces, adding new elements, textures, and focal points. Beautiful landscaping can enhance indoor rooms significantly, so when planning a landscape project it is important to look at all of the spaces from inside the home as well as from the street and the backyard.

For example, landscape elements like water features can be enjoyed visually from inside the home, but can also be heard when the windows are open, thus bringing the outdoors inside on a nice summer day. Up-lighting of focal points like specimen trees and water features with low voltage lighting will add depth and warmth to your yard in the evening, particularly during dark winter nights. Perhaps consider adding a gas-burning fire pit or fireplace that can be viewed from inside and enjoyed in your outdoor spaces.

Moving from one space to the next, everything should feel congruous stylistically and flow well together spatially. From a functional standpoint, the use of outdoor spaces for dining, socializing, playing, growing food, or merely relaxing is an important consideration and can add to your overall usable space for entertaining. Creating good flow requires consideration of the spaces themselves and planning for how they interact with each other and with adjacent interior spaces.

Practical aspects of these transitions between spaces are just as important as the visual ones. For example:

  • When there’s lots of traffic between outdoor and indoor spaces, exposed grass or dirt can create a muddy mess – a patio, deck, or other raised surface is the best transition in the high-traffic areas.
  • If you grill or dine outdoors often, your kitchen should flow easily onto a patio or deck with easy transitions so that carrying items outside is as quick and easy as possible.
  • Trees and shrubs that are large at maturity should be placed far enough away from windows and doors so as not to block them once the plants are fully grown. Planning should take growth and change over time into consideration.

Weaving the home’s architectural style and owner’s tastes graciously through the interior and exterior of the home will create a harmonious setting that will increase value and enjoyment of both interior and exterior spaces.

At its heart, landscape architecture is the art of planning spaces that change seasonally and over time. Our team at Urban Oasis Design & Construction will be sure to plan for the best placement of all of your desired landscape elements including patios, hardscapes, water features and plantings to integrate with a residence’s interior spaces. Contact us for a free design consultation to learn more about our process for creating a landscape that is the ideal match for your home.

Featured photo source: Pixabay.com

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