The latest inside-out trends

If you still think the garden is simply a place to train roses, sow salad and propagate perennials, you may have missed a few changes in our home-making habits of late. An increasing number of us are now breaching the threshold of our indoor spaces, with everyday activities moving out into the open for summer.

Guy Hollaway, the architect founder of Hollaway Studio, built his own luxuriously proportioned outdoor living space a few years ago when he extended his Kent cottage. The concrete kitchen floor now flows under a sliding glass wall and out to a recessed sofa area. Nearby is a vast dining table – as close to the working parts of the kitchen, once the doors are open, as the indoor table. “In the summer, we live out there,” Hollaway says. “Invariably, clients want something similar. They want the kitchen really close to the outside, and we are putting pools closer and closer to the house, too, so that the exchange between indoor and outdoor living is made easy.”

Design brands, from tiling companies to furniture- and lighting-makers, are evolving their portfolios at breakneck speed to feed the need for hard and soft furnishings that are not only rugged enough to cope with wind and rain but also, increasingly, align aesthetically with our interior effects.

The blurring of the divide starts with flooring. Tile brands such as Florim and Marca Corona are focusing on products that will straddle the threshold. “We are picking tiles for our current project that can be used inside and out: the only thing that changes is the slip resistance,” says Helena Martin, head of interior design at Hollaway Studio. She cautions that wherever water might be present – thanks to those dipping in and out of the pool, for example – it’s essential that a tile finish does not have the potential to turn into an ice rink.

Furniture brands are moving to recreate their iconic pieces for outdoors – Gubi recently took the classic Pierre Paulin Pacha chair poolside – or developing their already weatherproofed collections to a higher spec. “We want to feel good everywhere in the same way. Having identified the style that makes us feel at ease inside the home, we want to be able to transfer the same mood to our outdoor space,” says Massimiliano Messina, president of Italian furniture brand Flou. “And the need to feel ‘well’, even in the open air, has become increasingly important.”

To this end, Flou has been developing textiles that are technically strong and resist the elements, while retaining the soft tactility, tonal flexibility and visual appeal of those inside. It has applied them to existing seating models – for example, the Pierre sofa – so there is total synergy of styles inside and out.

Italian outdoor furniture-maker Fast, meanwhile, has been expanding its material palette, adding tactile iroko wood and Corten-effect stoneware to better match interior colours and materials, while developing new furniture types for outdoors. One of its latest products is the Ninfea sideboard, designed for the storage of outdoor tableware. Cbdesign has developed Casual Modular, a flexible seating system that can partition off outdoor spaces into “rooms”.

When it comes to outdoor lighting, in order to recreate the ambient tones of a nighttime interior, the best option is to pick from the growing category of nomadic table lights. This includes Matteo Fogale’s Caret for &Tradition and Samy Rio’s Quasar for Petite Friture, which can be placed on a surface or hung, lantern-like.

While in the UK we have only recently begun to emulate the outdoor living rooms of Puglia and Paxos, we’ve quickly tapped into the work of designers who know how to furnish them with bold concepts and home comforts. It’s a trend that will only get bigger.

Pictures from top: iconic furniture by Gubi; an indoor-outdoor project by Hollaway Studio; an outdoor room by Florim; and pieces by Italian studio Fast