Designing Outdoor Living Spaces along CO’s Front Range

Making your yard a creative extension of your home is the most basic definition of an outdoor living environment.

Until outdoor living environments became common, most yards consisted of a concrete slab or a rectangular deck, a BBQ grill, and a table with chairs. Now the goal is to integrate features that enhance the outdoor living experience, while at the same time creating defined spaces for those features. This is the same concept that is used to design the inside of a house – make multiple spaces out of a single space for specific purposes.

Similar to building a custom deck, you’ll need to establish a budget, determine if there are zoning restrictions, and check with your Home Owners Association.

Next it’s time to consider how to design your outdoor living environment. What are your individual tastes, how will you use the outdoor space, and what accessories are you interested in? Accessories include hot tubs, fire pits, built-in BBQ grills, built-in tables, deck and patio covers, pergolas, drainage systems, trellis’, hardscapes, water features, heaters, walls, storage, lighting, and more. These features will play a large role in determining the size and layout of individual outdoor living areas.

Other considerations include how individual outdoor living areas integrate with one another, what will the traffic patterns be, scenery of your yard and the surrounding landscape, access to your outdoor living areas from the house and from the yard, how to make the outdoor living area compliment your home, and more.

Outdoor living environments comprised of various components are complex projects and require the experience of multiple professionals, including architects, engineers, electricians, plumbers, gas fitters, flat workers, truss builders, stone installers, deck builders, landscapers, roofers, gutter installers, masons, painters, stucco, and wrought iron fabricators, amongst other trades. It also requires experienced field staff to successfully manage these projects.