Whether your home is located along one of the beautiful beaches of Australia or in an idyllic site in the backcountry, creating a seamless transition to an outdoor living area by extending your interior design colours and themes to your garden, patio, deck or other outside living area will allow you to enjoy your surroundings more.
Creating outdoor living spaces that mirror the home’s interiors not only blurs the line between indoors and outside, it draws the eye through the landscaping and into the perfect vintage point to enjoy the view. Here are the best tips for using your interior colours outdoors to ensure a seamless transition between your home’s interior and exterior.
The Best Tips For Extending Your Interior Design Colours Outdoors
Flooring
The right flooring can cleverly blur the line between outdoor living areas and indoors, allowing for a nearly seamless flow to the outdoors. Use the same weatherproof flooring, such as stone, decorative or polished concrete, or weatherproof timber flooring or decking material, outside as well as in the indoor space leading to your outdoor living area to create this blurred line.
Walls and Solid Surfaces
When designing your outdoor living space, consider the exterior colours and design style of your home in order to gain an insight into the palette and style direction your indoor and outdoor spaces should take. The colour palettes and schemes of the interior of your home should mirror those of the outdoor living spaces; and they should also be derived from the natural landscape surroundings.
This will ensure that the outdoor spaces feel like extensions of the interior of the house. Great examples of colours that lend to nature and can help integrate the landscape into the exterior living spaces include: sandy tones inspired by ground coverings and branches, blue tones inspired by the sky and water, green tones inspired by shrubs, trees and grasses, and yellow and orange outdoor cushions or pillows inspired by a flowering landscape.
As well as flooring and walls, be sure to take the other solid surfaces from the interior to the outdoors. For example, you can use the same countertop materials, lighting fixtures or even ceiling and beam details outdoors.
Outdoor Furniture
Choosing outdoor furniture pieces that match your indoor pieces is a simple yet effective way to merge your indoor and outdoor colours. If you cannot
find outdoor furniture pieces that are exact matches for the ones in the interior of your home, painting your garden furniture to reflect the colour scheme in the indoor space may work just fine. While at it, be mindful of the view and avoid selecting high furniture that could obstruct the view of the outside area.
Shade Structures
Shade structures, such as shade sails, awnings and umbrellas, add an overhang to wide-open entrances, porches, decks, patios and other outdoor living spaces, blurring the line between indoors and out. These shade structures come in a wide variety of fabrics featuring an extensive range of colours – which means it is very easy to find a fabric that can help you extend your interior design colours and themes to your outside deck or patio.
Indoor Plants and Landscaping
Last but not least, implementing a scattering of plants both indoors and outside can help connect the indoor spaces with the outdoors. Place potted plants inside the house and other forms of greenery similar to those found in the surrounding area or landscape to blend the two areas together. If your home is located along the beach or sea, using knick-knack such as shells, rocks and driftwood on your deck will help you to provide near-seamless connections between the two spaces.
If you have a showpiece garden, placing vases of bright-coloured flowers in your indoor space will enable the garden to flow into the interior of your house. And installing outdoor lighting will enable you to enjoy the gorgeous view of the outside area even at night.
Extending your interior design colours outdoors has so many benefits. It will allow you – the homeowner – to make your living space appear bigger, brighter and more modern. It also allows you to create beautiful, functional, and comfortable living areas outside of the home so you can strengthen your connection with the outdoors as well as have more room for entertainment. For these reasons and more, you should take steps to bring your interior colour scheme outside.