Improving Indoor- Outdoor Flow in Your Home

Use Your Flooring to Unite Your Spaces - Duncansby Road Home

No doubt, like most other New Zealander’s, you spend most of your summer evenings outside, soaking up the last of the sun’s rays. No matter the size of your areas, the key to creating the perfect indoor-outdoor flow is to design or incorporate a transition that is as seamless as possible.  Here’s how to achieve a smooth transition:
 
Remove Visual and Physical Barriers
Many Kiwi homes connect to back yards with little or no windows. Removing these visual and physical barriers can open up your space, create easy access and allows more light to enter, which is an easy way to create a seamless transition from indoor to outdoor. Making use of large windows, sliding, French or bi-fold doors, you can create an illusion that there are NO walls, therefore, blurring the boundaries between indoor and outdoor.
 
Use the Floor to Unite Your Spaces
Creating a feeling of unity and connection between your indoor and outdoor areas is best achieved by maintaining a consistent floor level between the different spaces. This unity creates a feeling of one large open space. For example, decking works well with connecting to internal timber floors.
 
Tip: By maintaining a consistent floor direction and similar floor colouring or materials, you can integrate these different areas together as one space.
 
Incorporate Illusions
You can try this with some of your key design elements. By mirroring or echoing elements of your kitchen, living or dining areas can create an illusion of blurred lines between your indoor and outdoor areas, unifying them and making them feel connected as one.

Don’t Let the Weather Stop You From Entertaining
In the case of unpredictable weather, having back-up entertaining areas is a great idea. By designing a combination of covered and uncovered areas, this creates options to connect with the outdoors, even if the weather turns sour.

Relocating or shifting internal areas such as living or dining furniture closer to your windows and doors, is a cost effective way to create the impression that your room is larger or more connected than it is, with your outdoor garden area in close view.

If you have specific design objectives and goals that you want to incorporate to better improve the indoor- outdoor flow of your home or project, let us know so we can make sure the interior flooring side is taken care of, so you can meet your design visions with precision. After all, we are flooring experts! Let us know how we can help!

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