With spring around the corner, it might be time to spend a little more time in- and on – your yard. Let’s make it COUNT! You can easily feed two (or more) birds with one scone when you create an outdoor room – a space designed to expand your living area without necessarily adding any more solid wall or roof!
Make an outside space you want to spend time in that ALSO fixes design or lifestyle challenges you’ve been having in other spaces. Done right, an upgrade to your yard can be an upgrade to your house, too!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
How to make your outdoor room do more
First, consider how you want to use the space.
Is it for morning coffee, evening relaxation, family gatherings, or entertaining friends? This will help you identify the location and choose the elements you’ll need to create your room. A social space in the front yard might be a great fit for a family who wants to visit and play with neighbors on summer evenings. While a quiet shaded corner of the back or side yard would be perfect for someone who longs for solo time to curl up and read in nature.
The simple outdoor room recipe
A comfortable outdoor room creates a sense of enclosure with elements like walls, fences, shade sails, or even trees. Aim for your room to have three “sides” to create a cozy and defined space. You could use an existing deck as the base, then add a shade sail or light for overhead shelter and finish the space with a rectangular planter for a “wall.”
The recipe for a good outdoor room is SO simple.
- A place to sit: chair, bench, louger, hammock, table etc
- Some enclosure: at least three “sides of a cube”
- Underfoot: concrete, pavers, a deck or even just a mown area of grass
- At your back: a fence, a hedge, a wall of your house or (ideally) two, forming a corner
- Overhead: humans like to feel a little protected from the sky but this doesn’t have to be a roof. It could be tree branches, a shade sail, an open wood trellis
- Bonus point for a few amenities to draw you to the space: overhead lights to define the area at night, handy power for your devices, a focal point like a fire pit or chiminea.
Remember to think about how the outdoor room connects to your indoor spaces. Is it easy to arrive and enjoy the space? Are there ways to help your outdoor room feel connected to and like an extension of your home?
Then add mid-century flavor!
To find inspiration, look to vintage sources like Better Homes and Gardens covers from the 1950s, which showcase a variety of creative and surprisingly modern feeling outdoor room designs.
Here are the vintage covers I mention in the matching podcast episode!
In Today’s Episode You’ll Learn:
- Why an outdoor room is a perfect addition to your mid-century home.
- What you need for a simple outdoor room you’ll love.
- How to create (or purchase!) a level one outdoor room.
Listen Now On
Quick design tip for…indoor outdoor flow
One of the cornerstones of mid-century modern design is the seamless flow between indoor and outdoor spaces. An outdoor room can invite you outside to enjoy your yard. Are there also ways your home could encourage you to flow into the outdoors?
Grab my Design Cornerstones workbook to explore indoor/outdoor floow and the rest of the cornerstones of mid mod design!
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
The NuTone Built-in Blender
These countertop blenders were the height of 1960s kitchen technology. A single under-counter motor powered various attachments like a blender, mixer, and even a knife sharpener.
While some folks found them convenient, others preferred their individual appliances. But there’s no denying the Jetsons-like appeal of these innovative devices. And, with many still functioning today, their ability to stand the test of time!
Would you bring back this bit of kitchen history?
Resources
- Check out our series on mid-century landscapes with Ginkgo Leaf Studio: How to plan a Mid-century landscape…is that a thing?, Mid-Century Hardscapes and Feature Elements with Ginkgo Leaf Studio, Light up your Mid-Century yard with Ginkgo Leaf Design
- Want us to master plan for you? Apply to work with us to get on my calendar for a quick Discovery Call!
- Get ready to remodel with my free Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)” available on demand!
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
It is starting to get intermittently very nice outside in the Midwest. How is it where you are? For homeowners, this always brings around a desire to spend more time outside, and the return of your outdoor project to do list from last year or the last couple of years back to the top of mind.
And for those of us with even the opposite of a green thumb, hey, that’s me, we still start to think about a little raking, a little clearing the patio or deck area, a little putting back outdoor furniture where it belongs, even if for you all its brought up is a desire to drink your morning coffee standing outside the back door.
Let’s discuss today the concept of an outdoor room, and by that, I don’t mean a screen porch or a sunroom. I mean the outside spaces around your house where you could be extending your enjoyable living areas, sometimes with just a few simple tweaks. Hey there. Welcome back to mid modern model. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2013.
Let’s see what’s new around here. I’m going to be wrapping up round two of voting for the mid mod madness on Instagram soon. If I haven’t already, have you popped over to my story to be voting on these I started a few weeks ago in late March, and I always mean to post daily, but then I’m actually pretty intermittent about it, because they are a little labor intensive and life gets in the way.
But the good news is, none of these design features are going anywhere. You either have a great mid-century original feature or you don’t right now, maybe voting for one will cause you to want to include that lost feature back into your next plan for improving your home. Speaking of the Instagram story at the end of last week, I mentioned online that I had an unexpected gap in our design roster due to a couple of clients needing to push back their planning energy to a slightly later moment for personal reasons.
This means it’s a great moment for you to get a faster than usual first impulse to start design to final results pipeline on a mid-century master plan from mid mount, Midwest. If you’ve been curious about working with us on a plan for your home, one that might involve, for example, better connections between your existing inside spaces and the outdoor room potential in your yard.
Stop hesitating and reach out now we can just have a conversation about it. I’d love to schedule a call with you to talk about what’s great and not great right now, about your home, about your life and your family, about what you need in a home, and how we can help you set the vision for a big soon upgrade to your house, or a series of calculated improvements you can tackle one at a time to add up to greatness.
Oh, at the end of this episode, I’m going to point you towards a great, low cost resource for DIY planners. I recently knocked down the cost of all of my prerecorded mid-century design clinics. These were all live, two hour workshops I’ve given in the past that are meant to be available for ready to remodel students continuously.
But anyone can sign up and get access to one, and it will walk you through both the introspection, the thought process, the self-reflection that you want to do before you dive in on design details. It will also talk to you about how to assess your house for its current outdoor room potential, and how to set a style guide that’s going to work with the house that you’ve got right now and make those additive changes you might do if you’re going to reside, if you’re going to change windows, if you need to re-roof at some point, how all of those pieces add up to opportunities to create great new spaces.
Plus a host of design tips. This is all specifically in the design clinic for patios, porches and decks. You can see all of the mid-century design clinics I’ve given in the past at the learn with us tab on my website. I’ll link to it in the show notes, but I will specifically be focusing on the patios, porches and decks design clinic that I gave a couple of years ago. And it is, it’s really valuable resource that I just want everyone to have access to. So you can get that now for $37.
If you pop over to mid mod midwest.com for today’s show notes, just add slash 2013 to the end for this week’s mid mod design resource, I wanted to tie straight into our actual topic, which will be outdoor spaces. And so I want to talk about the flow between indoor and outdoor spaces.
This is one of the cornerstone concepts of good mid-century design and of a perfect mid mod remodel, and so much so that I included it in the four cornerstones of a mid mod remodel. In short, those are that you make sure you infuse all of the design choices you make as much as possible, with asymmetry, with simple, playful shapes, with a mix of materials that are both vintage and modern, that delight your eye, with beautiful wood grain and unpainted stone and brick, but also keep things practical with a smattering of mass produced and easy to keep up finishes.
Back in the day, this would have been Formica and linoleum. Today, it might be marmoleum and a solid surface countertop. So yes, all of those things, and also a fourth one, which is to create every opportunity you can to have good flow between inside and outside spaces. The platonic ideal of a mid-century house in America is probably a cliff may or an Eichler designed California ranch house these West.
Coast homes separate their structure from their exterior walls and open up into interior courtyards or back patios that light life flow smoothly between inside and out. Interior spaces share functions and floor plan divided more by furniture groupings than by walls and doors.
Now in a Midwestern or a builder grade Ranch, there are much more clearly defined boundaries between outside and in, but there is still some clear flow between spaces. And what’s great about this is that the flowing spaces of a mid-century home encourage us to live exactly the kind of casual, flowing togetherness life that we want in a mid-century, in a modern life that a mid-century home is so well suited to.
So this is a choose your own adventure scenario. How much you open up the spaces between and within and around your mid-century home depends on your taste, your yard, your climate, your lifestyle, but there’s always a benefit, wherever you can create a connection, wherever you can open up some interior walls inside your home to make it larger with long diagonal sight lines, and whenever you can create more flow between the inside spaces and an adjacent deck or patio or the yard beyond it lets you borrow living area without paying for an addition.
So to create good flow between spaces, you have to ask yourself some questions. You have to ask how it’s doing right now, how open or closed is your house at the moment? Make a note of your room to room and your inside to outside connections list any open doorways, sliders, picture windows, glass walls, any and all the ways you can currently walk or see through your exterior walls.
And then assess where you need or want more connection than you have. Do you have a good connection from your kitchen to an outside eating area, or do you have to walk along circuitous route to get around? Remember that the ways that your outside spaces connect to each other also affect that flow. So as you’re thinking about any kind of remodel, pay attention to the four cornerstones of mid-century design.
And if you want to grab my free PDF resource that kind of outlines these and asks you some starter questions to think about them, you can grab that anytime you want by going to mid mod midwest.com/cornerstone or cornerstones, I think both of those actually tracked at the same spot and start the process of thinking about a remodel that’s not just going to improve your life, but it’s going to improve the mid-centuryness of your house.
Okay, so let’s flow right into the concept of outdoor rooms, and how outdoor rooms are an absolutely essential component of good flow inside and outside in your house, and how they are sometimes one of the most effective, cheap and easy, buildable, developable, ways to improve on your house.
You can do one tiny project at a time, one weekend at a time, to add up to a gorgeous outdoor room, or you can make a plan, have a set of vision, consult with a local landscape design company and have them execute it for you all in one big flow. That is another way to go about it, but one way or another.
Today, I’m going to talk to you about some of the design features, the necessities of a good outdoor room, how you can use an outdoor room to improve on the quality of your inside spaces, and what design ideas we can borrow from original mid-century houses to make outdoor rooms that are specifically enhancing the mid mod charm of our houses. Let’s get into it.
A couple of different factors converged on me to cause me to throw out my pre planned episode for this week. I’ll do it later and give you this one instead. If you’re curious, here’s some insight into the shiny, tangly, sparkly yarn snarl that is sometimes my brain. The first factor was the resource I shared last week, my COVID era guide to creating micro sitting spaces around your existing home, to expand it without expanding it to make more functional use spaces within it.
And one of the potential sitting areas was an outdoor space, an outside Oasis, I called it, which was a wonderful thing to have during COVID, when we couldn’t really go into public spaces outside if you had any kind of a yard, not all of our yards, particularly for people with mid-century houses, particularly for people with Time Capsule mid-century houses, not all of our yards have inviting places to be at rest, cozy reading corners, so I’d recommended you needed just a few key features to put an outdoor room into your yard.
The first one was a seat, a place, a comfortable chair with arms, a lawn chair could be great, but you could also, at that point, when we were resources were limited, steal a chair from the living room in a pinch, or spread out a blanket and pillows, again, a shelf, a handy space for setting things down, a light source, which, when you’re sitting outside, might not be an issue directly.
You might be wanting more shade than light, but it’s nice to have the ability to sort of tune your light environment, power, which might just be an extension cord. You can see how these are all pretty basic elements I’m including here, and it’s basically just a shaded place to sit outside with power and definition. But the sketch that I included actually told a bigger story. It was an image of a lawn chair with a little side table next.
It, a laptop and a glass on top of it, extension cord draped in front of the scene. But more importantly than this chair and table, which are not just sitting in open space, they are seated between. They are sighted, rather between a tree and a fence, and between the tree and the fence is stretched a triangular shade sail.
Now what I didn’t actually say in this diagram or explain in this Nook is one of the key principles of creating an outdoor room. More on that in a moment. The second factor that caused me to want to think about outdoor spaces, outdoor rooms, was it’s nice out right now here in the Midwest, or it was on the day that I changed gears and decided to do this episode at this precise moment, it’s overcast and raining, but on Friday, it hit 75 it was breezy, it was beautiful.
We’re starting to get green shoots. I know this isn’t true everywhere. At some places it’s green already all the time. Other places, green is still far away. But I walked my dog and saw a person swinging in their hammock in their yard, which reminded me to go hang my hammock in my backyard, in my very subtly created outdoor room.
And for me, it actually looks a lot like the little sketch that I put together. It’s a flat patio area with big, 18 inch by 18 inch pavers, which were, I think they were about 100 pounds each, and they were the most intense thing my dad and I did in our intense DIY era of the house was laying those pavers ourselves with no mechanical aid, really, so grateful we didn’t injure our backs.
But anyway, a big paper patio chair and table set that I got at a vintage market one time, a hammock, but also a shade sale overhead that stretches between the wall of the house an adjacent big arching oak tree that has a lot of shade creation and space creation in itself.
And then my neighbor’s house kind of creates a fence line that makes a right angle corner, so I feel very protected in that space. Just simply slinging a hammock is the only activity I need to do to kind of activate that room for myself. Once I’ve got the shade sale up for the year, but it is an extension of my house, and it functions for very practical purposes, even with very simple, low budget materials and not a lot of it’s not a porch, it’s not a deck, it doesn’t have a roof, it doesn’t have walls, it doesn’t have screen enclosure, but it is very functionally an outdoor room.
So those first two pieces, the resource from last week, and then my thinking about getting back into my own outdoor spaces that I love in my own Midwestern life reminded me of more of design specific conversation that I had last week, and it all came together to say to me, turn this into a podcast episode. That conversation was one of my I do a lot of 30 minute zoom consult calls where we either focus on one specific challenge, the material choices for a specific space.
I think of that as like a design SOS call, or more of a whole house audit. What should happen first? How should we address something first, next, last? What are the priorities? What are the possibilities for this space? And we can really cover a lot of ground in these 30 minute calls. The topic of this one was layout potential for a remodel what had been rather a divided up, closed off little ranch house that had kind of a square center area of social spaces that were divided into four individual rooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and a family room.
And in the remodel, this client, who called me was had been proposed by a drafts person that they could structurally, they could knock out all those walls and make one big four times the size open plan area at the inside of the house. And their question was, should they? Is that a good idea? Was it going to work well for them?
But tangentially, we got into the topic of, what about the deck that opened off the back side of the house from the kitchen and the family room side. Now open plan or closed, that’s actually maybe that’s a whole separate podcast topic for a couple of weeks from now. But to me, I thought this tangential area and the tangential topic of I could see in the floor plan I need shared with me, beyond the kitchen and the living room, there was a rectangle that indicated deck. Very simple floor plan, but I immediately wanted to know more about that space.
Was it a walk out at grade backyard? Was there space below? What was happening on that deck? Because that it kind of changes the math of the whole open plan space. It wasn’t in our in our last analysis, we decided it might not be necessary to completely blow out all the walls and create walls and create a big open square in the center, the social center of that house with a modern, open plan kitchen might be better, cheaper, more cost effective, but also more livable and more furnishable.
To keep those spaces somewhat divided up, even while creating more openings and more connections between them. But one of his concerns was, if he didn’t blow it all open, if he didn’t remove all of the walls, would the back of the house feel small. And I actually think one of the hugest opportunities we have is not to remove all the walls interior to our house, to get the one exterior wall to the from the back to the front of the house open. Sometimes you can start from the center.
Of the house, which may or may not have structural or stair or other logistical reasons for making it hard to open and instead double the capacity of the house by reaching outward to an outdoor space. But it only works if you work the plan correctly just plopping a patio a little poured concrete pad beyond the sliding door of an eat in kitchen space, for example, is never going to do the trick. It’s not going to make the house feel bigger, just popping on even a simple deck.
And I guess once he we talked about the space a little more. It was a second floor, a walk out to an exposed basement below. So a deck about the size of the adjacent living room, generously sized, but it didn’t have any kind of backstop. It just had a lightweight railing surrounding it.
Sometimes people want to put very visually light railings around decks like that, because they think it’ll help the whole space feel more open, but actually it just gives you a sense of space goes on infinitely into the void beyond the space of the deck. If you can create an end point. If you can enclose the deck itself, make it a little bit more of an outdoor room, possibly with something overhead, like a trellis or a shade sale or even just a bit of expanded roof line.
If you can create a privacy screen, a more solid railing type, if you can anchor a built in dining bench corner, you can create a larger sense of space between the inside room and the outside room that it’s adjacent to. So that caused me to want to just talk a little bit about the nature of outdoor rooms and how powerful they can be, and sometimes how simple the tweaks are that you need to take on in order to make the most of outdoor space.
Turn an outdoor space, turn your yard, your lawn, into outdoor rooms of your house. And I’ve talked before about additions, about screen porches, about sunrooms, about covered and enclosed spaces, but today I’m really talking about how to make a room out of the outdoors, free span standing, open air spaces that will feel pleasant and enclosed, and make you want to be at rest in them because of a few simple design moves you can take on.
Perhaps the most simple goes back to the image that I sketched kind of mindlessly in 2020 of an outdoor oasis, a chair comfortably set against a wall, a fence with an overhead endpoint as well with a shade sale above it. This is such a powerful concept when you’re harnessing it, whether you have limited budget right now, but you still want to do a little bit to improve your house, you can use this to do to make a transformation to your outdoor spaces with simple features.
Or you can use these concepts in tandem with a bigger remodel to expand and extend and make more of the spaces that you’re adding. Like this fellow who was consulting, we can really make even more of the space that he’s going to open up. We don’t need to go to the expense of a complete open plan change, all the flooring, all the materials, all the new furnishing options.
We can get him more space by making more of his deck. And I just came across this in another project where we’re doing a kitchen mini master plan, and the adjacent patio space is very underutilized right now, kind of under baked. It’s a nice Hemi sphere, Hemi circle poured concrete patio space. But I could see when I when I looked at this project in the original listing photos.
The previous owners had been more avid gardeners, which, you know, not everybody needs to be an avid gardener, but there had been a lot of vigorous, kind of tall, almost weight height, waist height, plantings around the outer perimeter of this half circle patio. And now that they don’t exist anymore, it feels less like a place and more like the beginning of yard, it feels less divined, less contained, less enclosed.
So we made a few simple suggestions. And the first, the sort of level one suggestion of what they could do to improve their kitchen by improving this patio was just to bring back something simple, low maintenance, waist high plants around the edge, and then maybe to put two posts out into the yard and extend a shade sale out to give an overhead protection.
Why do I keep talking about overhead protection? Well, when you’re thinking about an outdoor room, you have to think about the quality of feeling like you’re in a place, that you’re not just walking through space, you’re not walking along a sidewalk, you’re not walking through a park, you are at rest, and you want to stay there.
You want to feel like you’re inside a room, and so you kind of have to create the container of that space psychologically. If you think about the space being the sides of a cube, you’ve got six to work with. And I like to say you want to fill in at least a suggestion of three, at a minimum four, ideally to feel enclosed. You don’t want to actually be boxed and then you’re inside. You want to feel want to feel like you’re outside, but you want to give a suggestion of enclosure to some of the sides of that cube. If we start from the extreme, if you have no sides of the cube filled in, you’re floating in space. Now that’s that might be cool, but it’s also they make horror movies where the preview is just a person.
In a suit, floating alone in space. It’s not comfortable. It does not feel secure as a human. It’s not good for our psychology. Likewise, standing on one surface, standing alone on an open plane with no walls around you and no ceiling, this gets us back to uh, Oh, am I all on my own in the Serengeti who’s coming after me? I’m not safe.
This isn’t good. It doesn’t feel restful. If you’re standing on a flat surface, leaning back against a wall, you’ve got your back protected. That’s better, but it’s still, it’s not relaxing. It’s not comfortable enough. So if you want to get to the three a floor, one wall, you can do another wall. Now you’re in a corner, even if you’re not tucked into the corner, you feel more protected and clothed and contained.
And then perhaps instead, you’ve got a floor, you’ve got a wall, and you’ve got an overhead and again, it doesn’t have to be a roof, it doesn’t have to be a ceiling. It could just be a shade sale. It could be the extended branches of an oak tree, but you’ve got a reason to sit down and stay for a while. My favorite version is, if you can have a corner, two walls that come together and nice, a defined floor.
I mean, if you’re standing on the ground, you’re standing on a ground surface. But that floor being different, being patio versus grass, being a low deck that’s raised up, or if it’s an if it’s a higher deck, you’re not looking down through it. It feels solid and secure. This, this really gets into games that designers have played with themselves since, since all of time.
One of the first design exercises I was assigned in my graduate school program was one called floor, walls, roof, and we were first assigned to make a space just with using only floor, walls and roof. But they weren’t to connect each other. They were meant to be sort of like floor planes, wall planes and ground planes. And the example they gave us was the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona pavilion, which, again, all of these things are coming together.
I was just talking about Mies van der Rohe and the Barcelona pavilion last episode, when we talked about the chair that he designed specifically to go into that space, the Barcelona chair. If you want to give it a Google or a lick, I’ll link into in the show notes and some images of the Barcelona pavilion. It is. It’s not a house. It’s meant to be an exhibition space for, I believe, the World’s Fair of one of the 1920s dates.
I’m not going to look it up right now, but it is a lot of glass. It has beautiful marble floors that extend out beyond the building, reflecting pool, hefty ceiling, and then these just there are glass exterior walls and a couple of long division walls, also made out of a beautiful veiny marble. And it’s just kind of playing the game of how many different planes do we need to make up a space, the trick of our design exercise of floor, walls and roof was the second version was okay. Now you’ve made a space that’s not a house, but it’s divine space using floor, walls and roof.
Now just do a space creating with make only floor and walls and trying to make it feel defined. And we ended up creating a lot of corners and a lot of mazes. And then finally, the challenge was to make a space with only floor, which kind of borders into landscape architecture? But it was an interesting object lesson in Yeah, you can make a definition of space. You can just put a rectangle on the ground. You can make it bigger. You can make it smaller. You can give it complicated steppingstone patterns. You can raise it up as a platform.
Those are fun design games to play as an architecture student. But when you are creating space around your house, what you’re looking for is not something that is cool or something designerly.
You’re looking for something that makes you feel the way you want to feel. So I’m going to wrap up this episode by pointing to a couple of really fun mid-century examples of defining space, and I’m going to prove their mid-century by they’re all going to be examples from the cover of old Better Homes and Gardens magazine issues showing people hanging out on their patios, which are lightly defined with stone walls, with brick walls, with fences with overhanging roofs, with trellis spaces, creating spaces that are definitively outside, but still feel like rooms.
But before we get into that, I’m going to take us through a little bit of a mini Master Plan thinking process. Because, of course, I am so if you’re thinking about an outdoor room for your house, you want to start by asking, what’s it for? You need to write a little story about what the space is for.
You need to think about, is this going to be an extension of your indoor life, probably, hopefully, ideally, what’s going to draw you out to it? Is it for morning time? Is it a place to reflect before you start the day? Is it for evening time? Is it just for your nuclear family? Is it just for one person? Is it kind of a retreat for adults to get away from the kids or is it a play space where kids are sent out to have their own time.
Is it for socializing? Is it for hosting? Is it, you know, if it’s just for two individual adults who don’t like to have friends over, it could work perfectly while still being quite small, compact. But if you’re going to invite the whole neighborhood over, it’s going to be more of a grand gesture, more open, more flowing than if you’re going to occupy it by yourself some of the time.
I would be completely remiss to talk about outdoor rooms, to talk about landscape, to talk about yards in general, without pointing you back towards a couple of fantastic interviews we’ve done over the last year with Jim Drzewiecki of Gingko Leaf Studio.
Jim is a landscape architect who, by preference, specializes in the yards of mid-century homes and does some really lovely modern updates landscape, environment specific, ecosystem aware, upgrades of the classic mid-century yard features of lawn and sculpted Juniper Bucha is you should check out episode 1703 which is just on the topic of mid-century landscaping, and what that means in general. That’s from April 2024.
Also be sure to catch episode 1801 from July of last year, which is talking about hardscapes, what kind of materials are good to use as the floor surface of mid-century homes, and then again in August of last year. So August 15, 2024, Episode 1806, we talked about lighting in the landscape of a mid-century home, which, again, lighting has a really big potential to create space to define this is the this is the outdoor room adjacent to the house, and out there that’s yard. So I’ll point you towards that.
So when you’re thinking about telling a story of what is your outdoor room for that why that is always the first step of the master plan process is going to be really important, and the next thing to take into account is to take stock of what’s going on in that space around that space. This isn’t just what does it look like right now, not just a picture, but also how does it function from a view versus privacy point of view.
Do you feel like there are parts of your yard that are too exposed to your neighbors that a simple modification, a privacy fence, just even inside your wall, a planting a tree in the right spot could help you with or is there a perfect view that you want to keep access to? I was just reading about a great mid-century home in Milwaukee that’s come on the market recently that was a downsizing empty nester house built in the mid-century era by a couple that had lived in a fancier, three story earlier era home.
They didn’t want to live in it anymore. They didn’t want to take care of it, so they moved into their own side yard. They sold the house and kept a slice of the property and built a walkout basement ranch on that property, which would be easier for them to live in and maintain but kept their exact same view out to the backyard, falling down over a hill, escape.
So think about what are the views that you like? Can you see a sunset? Can you see a sunrise? Can you see off into a distance or is there even just a certain quality of light that you enjoy, a tree in the distance that you might or might not be able to control for but you like to look at right now. You also want to think about aspects of light.
Depending on your climate. You might be looking for more shade, an escape from the heat of the day, or you might be looking for a place where you can soak up the sun. This also has to do with your personal preferences, by the way, because Sun People are Sun seekers, and some people are Sun shunners, and so that is a defining question for how your outdoor room is going to work.
You might want to define a space with a trellis overhead that gives you a sense of enclosure, but absolutely does not cut down on your sunset, your sun access at all. Or you might want a shade sale, because it’s going to provide you with a place where you can sit outside without having to get sunglasses and a hat every time you step out the door. So another thing to take account of is, can you increase or can you at least not decrease, the passive solar potential of your house when you’re creating an overhanging roof element.
Are you helping? Maybe on a west facing wall, you’re actually providing necessary shade inside the house to lower your cooling burden. Or on the flip side, you do want to be careful when you’re creating outdoor space, particularly if you’re going further to create a screen porch or a three season room. If you’re extending your roof line, you may be cutting off valuable daylight to the interior of the house.
This is unrelated to this episode. This is often a problem we solve for mid-century kitchens that get land locked. They once looked out over a porch, over a deck, even over a screen room that then got enclosed into the house for added space and turned into a three season room or four season room or a den, and suddenly the house has a kitchen that doesn’t have an exterior window anymore, and it often becomes quite dark. Sometimes we can solve that problem with the skylight. Sometimes it means moving or expanding or extending the location of the kitchen. But whenever you’re making good decisions for one part of the house, if you’re creating a great outdoor room, make sure you’re not making the indoor spaces less good.
Can improve upon in and around the house, so you can improve on the solar potential, the privacy, the views and the use of light in and around your house. So let’s reach back to the mid-century era for some inspiration for how to create a really nice outdoor room. And what better place to look at than actual mid-century homes in their original, mid-century authentic condition. To do that, I did a quick survey.
Actually just hit on an image on Pinterest when I was looking around for something else the other day, and it was a Better Homes and garden cover of a couple getting ready to serve food in their sort of patio area. And I thought this is a really clever, practical idea for expanding and extending your house space. And then when I looked down at the other suggested pins, there was a handful of other Better Homes and Gardens covers from the early the mid 50s, and each of them was creating outdoor space, creating outdoor room effects in a slightly different way.
These vintage ads or vintage magazine spreads are really valuable to those of us who love mid-century design, because when we look for inspiration for mid-century house remodels today, we’re if we’re looking at existing built houses, if we’re looking at other people’s homes, if we’re looking at sort of what Google search terms are going to turn up for us, we’re always at risk of being tainted by the modern ideas that are trending today.
Now that’s not necessarily a bad idea. We live modern lives. If you want to live in a modern house, there’s nothing wrong with that, but we kind of get it trapped in an echo chamber of what’s a good idea today, what are common builder techniques? If you’re thinking about a new deck and you flip through the lookbook of a local deck company. You’re not going to see mid-century decks.
You’re going to see modern ones, which are influenced by what’s convenient, by updates to the building code that have led people to choose new solutions by what modern building materials and building techniques and nail guns and fasteners and habits have made conventional, often modern solutions to mid-century problems are more are less labor intensive and more material intensive, whereas in the mid-century era, they were more likely to use simple building materials and put a little bit more labor time into assembling them, which makes sense based on the availability of materials and labor that they had at the time, and that we do.
But that doesn’t mean that we particularly, if we’re interested in DIY, particularly if you’re wanting to try your hand to something nonstructural, not even weather tight that you can’t use some mid-century techniques to DIY a really fun shade structure or wall or privacy fence for A mid-century style outdoor room. So anyway, these magazine covers are a huge resource for us. Because if you’re wondering what people thought was cool in 1954 if you’re wondering what the original solution for the outdoor patio of this mid-century house was, well, it was this.
There’s no There’s no question of like, oh, is this maybe an 80s edition? It’s authentic. It’s original. So the very first one is benefiting. It’s clearly a patio that was designed with the house. It’s got a really fun feature of you can see the existing sort of stone fireplace sticking up beyond the roof line in the image. And the same type of stone is being used to make a wall, not full adult eyeline height. Probably you could walk right up to that wall and peek over it, but for someone out at the sidewalk, you wouldn’t be able to look up and see into this patio space. And that is clearly extending some sort of finish from the front of the house.
It’s a decorative material applied to part of the front wall of the house, and then it turns into a privacy wall that extends out. There’s a big, poured concrete patio. And then there are just, it’s a post and beam house, and the two center, the center beam and the front wall edge beam extend beyond the house and create a base to put some cross piece rafters on. Honestly, it might be almost a pretty good snapshot of what’s going on inside the on the roof structure of the house itself just carries on out same materials, same dimensional lumber, same structural beams, but they’ve thrown it looks, I mean, this is a sort of artist’s illustration.
It looks like they’ve put a translucent plastic material over the top of those rafters, something that you could change out every couple of years, every 10 years, if necessary, but would create not a completely dry zone, but a little bit of a dry area that you would step right out of the sliding door from the kitchen or from the dining room and out onto this dining patio.
And then there’s a built in grill that probably backs up to the fireplace on the inside, where the in this case, the gender normative behavior actually mom’s just sitting down eating and chatting with one son, and Dad is serving another son something from the outdoor grill. So it’s a great little slice of life, and it’s got all the things. It’s got the wall of the house providing one wall. It’s got the floor of a concrete patio providing the floor. It’s got overhead protection and a little bit of side privacy, not even going all the way up to full height. And you’ve got a gorgeous outdoor room. So if you wanted to apply this to your house, you.
Think about, do you have a brick or a stone material that is coming out from the house? Is that something you could add? This might be a time when you’re residing to think about adding a little bit of a feature wall. Or it doesn’t have to be attached to the house as a surface. It could be a privacy wall that runs beyond the front of the house and extends into your side yard to create a side yard, private patio. That’s a pleasant place to be.
You don’t have to have existing house beam and post structure coming out from here. You could think about creating a lattice or a trellis that attaches to the house. In some other cases, I’m looking at the other associated Better Homes and Gardens covers that popped up. There was one from 1953 that was just a simple roof overhang extended from the house. The wall of the house has a bunch of windows in it. The roof itself hangs out in an Eichler style, maybe four, maybe as much as, maybe as much as six feet.
It’s a little hard to tell from the scale of the chairs and the drip line of the roof is matched by a brick paver patio that’s exactly as deep as the shade as the as the roof line creates. And this is a fun it’s kind of creates an invisible outer wall. It doesn’t exist. But you could hang a screen, you could hang a fabric, you could hang a scrim from the exact same overhang of the roof hangs down to the patio.
Now, if you are blessed with deep roof overhangs, they’re probably not six feet, but if you’ve got a three foot roof overhang that right there is enough space to put a chair up against the house wall and start to feel a little bit protected, I wouldn’t recommend that you then terminate the flooring material and go from brick or concrete to grass at the edge of the roof line, you would probably want to create less of a perfect sort of tube, like Miss tube, missing one side, and more of an extended effort.
I actually, if I was going to redesign this image, which you can see in the show notes page, as the second one, I would extend the patio out further, because, again, it’s sort of right now, is creating an artificial boundary for the house. And you could, you could bring that boundary out a little bit further. But for everyone who is blessed with an overhang of your roof, you want to make the most of that. You want to think about how you can expand, extend and tuck under it to give yourself a little bit of that advantage of you’ve got a wall, you’ve got a floor. If you’ve got a little bit of a roof, you’ve got your three sides of a cube that you need.
And a third example that pop over to the show notes page to see it has a roof line that carries out a certain amount solid. It is the roof of the house extending out beyond, but then it immediately transitions in the exact same vertical horizontal plane from roof that is solid to open wooden trellis that is not solid, that’s letting light, that’s letting water, that’s letting air blow through, but it still creates that sense of enclosure. It does the exact thing I was looking for in the previous example.
And this is a 1955 home. It doesn’t surprise me that from 1953 where we have the sort of constricted concept of outdoor room in the 1955 version. Suddenly it’s expansive. Suddenly there’s room for sort of a sitting area in the foreground and a dining area in the background. You can grill out under that open trellis structure, because smoke isn’t going to get caught up under the roof and do any damage to it. And it becomes this really wonderful extension of the house.
Part of what makes it perfect, though, and if you’re working on the same thing, is getting the planes to align, is getting the exact bottom of the roof line to match up to the bottom of the trellis that carries you out, that extends your sense of outdoor room enclosure.
When you’re thinking about creating an outdoor room for yourself, there are so many fun strategies that let you expand the roof line of the house without having to pay for new roofing, without having to worry about water management.
You just need an open container of space, not something watertight or wind rated or weather tight, just something that gives you a sense of here you’re in a room, and over there you’re out in the yard, you can do a lot with the boundaries of overhead protection, a side wall, or even a suggestion of wall created by a few columns grouped closely together or set in an interesting angle, or in a third in a fourth example from the vintage era.
I’m going to show this as well a wooden trellis that then has some fabric elements woven through it. This would be a little bit of work to put up and take down every year, but you don’t even have the shade sail triangle. You could create your own shade sail out of Canvas that would go up and create more of a dappled shade effect than just a wooden screen or wooden grid.
And give you a sense of playfulness, of party of definition that encourages you to come out and sit for a while. This is also going to tie in with some of my if you’re tuning up your front door recommendations to pull a color that happens in the overhead shade, sale that happens in a chair, that happens somewhere around the house, and suddenly you’ve got material language happening in a consistent way.
I’m hoping that what this cheerful, rambling episode has given you is a sense of possibility for your outdoor spaces. If you want to create an outdoor room or improve on an outdoor space, you already have to up level it from.
Yeah, I have a patio beyond the dining room, but we never really want to sit there in the evening, and I don’t know why that is, or we have a deck that extends along the whole length of the kitchen, but it’s just not very comfortable to be out there.
You can think about improving the outdoor spaces you have already by conceptualizing them as outdoor rooms, because once you start to think about what is the side protection. What makes it feel like the glass in the walls of the house, the windows, the sliding doors, invites me to come out and think of this space as borrowed to the house.
And what makes it different than the outdoor space beyond some sort of a perimeter boundary, a step down, a material change, a railing that’s a little bit more solid than it needs to be for pure safety purposes, a privacy or a shade wall or an overhead protection can transform a space you already have with relatively minimal steps into an outdoor room where you want to spend every nice day this spring, summer and fall, or if you live in a certain climate, all day, every day for all the year round.
If you’re curious about how to take a more step by step approach, a more master plan specific approach to creating that kind of outdoor spaces, you might want to check out the mid-century design clinic I gave two or three years ago on patios, porches and decks and how to create really wonderful spaces the design principles behind them, the step by step process of thinking about design moves that will improve your particular space and again, of course, always how to tailor the space that you have for the life that you want to live in it.
If you’re not familiar with them, these mid-century design clinics are two hour live workshops that I occasionally give on topics that either come up again and again – like every January or February, or February, I do a live mid-century kitchen clinic – or topics that were asked for at one time.
And the recordings stay available so you can go back and watch them anytime you want to take two hours and devote it to thinking about your best practice for an addition your mid-century owner suite, improving your mid-century kitchen, or in this case, thinking about the outdoor spaces of your house.
Spring is a perfect time to set about creating or improving on some outdoor room aspects of the house you are already living your daily life in, and it can be such a powerful change agent to get you to come outside, to appreciate the environment, to take a beat to get away from screens to spend more time with your family. Mid-century design clinic on patios, porches and decks is a great extension of this episode that takes it from the philosophical to the practical, step by step process of thinking about what it would take to add or improve on a patio portrait deck around your mid-century home.
Or maybe you just need to drag a chair outside, set up a shade sale and back it up to a fence or a spreading oak tree, just like I was remembering I need to do, go hang up my hammock underneath the oak tree, cradled between my back garage wall and my neighbor’s den extension that doesn’t have any windows in it. It’s a perfect little outdoor room that I hardly had to do any work at all to create.
So you might be able to just go find an outdoor room for yourself and occupy it one way or another. I hope that you are getting a chance to take a deep breath and enjoy some of the outdoor life that’s coming back to life, particularly here in the Midwest.
And let’s get on to our mid-century design feature of the week. Our mid-century design feature of the week this week has nothing to do with outdoor spaces or indoor outdoor flow. I chose to go deep into the archives. I think something that went down in the first round, which was the built in countertop blender. The preeminent version of this in the mid-century era was the NuTone food center.
There might have been a couple of other options competitors, but this was sort of in the height of the 60s appliance future. Forward, we’re going to give you everything built in and ready to go. People were purchasing these new tone food centers, and what it looked like was just a little aluminum cover plate built into your Formica countertop. Underneath that, it had a motor that lived permanently under the counter, and you could just twist on and attach to it, mixing bowl, a blender, a knife sharpener, something called an osterizer, which I don’t even know what that is, but this was kind.
I think it was the answer to later we decided we needed individual appliances, and we would need appliance garages and bonus pantry storage to put all these things away. And this was sort of a space saving and also a high tech look how cool and technology technologically forward my kitchen is device.
As I scrolled through some forums, on Reddit and on vintage house stuff, I found a real mix of positive memories and wishing people had that. But also people saying, Yeah, we installed it. And then actually, my parents went back to using the original individual appliances that they had before that they liked better. Which to me, seems practical.
I’m kind of persnickety about the types of things I use. So unless I was completely in love with every feature of one of these, I probably would have wanted my own individual versions of some of these things. Still, there’s a way in which this seems just like absolutely the height of mid-century creativity and technological forward lookingness. It’s so much the house of the future vibe.
And I would imagine what I’ve heard is when you still for anyone who still has one of these units installed in their countertop, if you can get your hands on vintage plug in the twist on pieces, or if you can find them online, or if they came with the house, it all still works. It’s just like all the other mid-century appliances. It was built to last, and it still lasts.
And if you had a modern version of it, I’m not sure that’s true. There is actually a modern version of this. When a little bit of searching around gave me, took me to the multi chef, which is a modern version of a built in appliance motor that plugs in and lives underneath your counter. And then you can sort of switch in a blender and veggie blender and a mixer and all these things.
So instead of a KitchenAid that sits on your countertop all the time taking up space, you’ve got just a little flat surface with a few simple controls and all of these pieces that plug onto it. I’m curious, does this sound ideal to you, or does it sound like it’s limiting your control?
I think this is kind of a personality question, but I do love that idea of future, forward Jetsons style. Yes, it all plugs in and runs with secret motors vibe that it has. Also, if you want to do any Googling, I’ll link to it in the show notes too, the instructions and recipes that come with the inbuilt new tone mixer, Blender sharpener, juicer, device and it’s just really a classic of mid-century graphic design, if nothing else.
So maybe that’s the all the joy that we need right now. Or maybe this is actually something we should have back in our lives, if we only could. Certainly we live in an era of juicing and blending and power shakes and things like that. So maybe it would be perfectly practical addition to a modern version of a mid-century kitchen. What do you think if you’ve got one of these? I’d love to hear about it.
Pop over to my Instagram story and tell me about yours, if you like it, if it still works, or if you would hunt one down and replace it into your house in some sort of burst of Time Capsule glory. All right, that is it for this week. If you want any of the references, for particular, if you want to go check out any of those vintage Better Homes and Gardens ad covers or magazine covers with examples of how we were doing roofs that aren’t roofs on indoor outdoor rooms on outdoor room spaces, specifically in the mid-century era. You’re going to go over to our show notes page. That’s mid mod midwest.com/ 2013.
And I highly recommend you check it out, because anytime you’re thinking about an outdoor space, we’re going to be pushed even more towards the sort of builder, basic default, the Home Depot standard, the what every deck company in town is doing, and to sort of push the boundaries of using the deck installers and the patio materials and the basic cost effective outside home improvement efforts that we can but still keeping them lightly infused with mid-century vibes.
We’ve got to go to the vintage inspiration, even for those of us who are more modern mid-century lovers, we will find good inspiration in those vintage images that were just, I mean, they weren’t everywhere. This isn’t what everybody had in that era. They were aspirational for that era, but we can aspire to them again now, and I think with it, we should.
Next week, I’m going to be following up the question of indoor, outdoor flow with discussion of window coverings, because this was a requested topic that I got in my Instagram DMS. These days, I’ve been getting a lot of requests for, can you send me your podcast episode on fill in the blank? And nine times out of 10, I easily can.
But every now and then, I get a request for a topic I’ve never actually covered before, and that’s come up a bunch of times this season in roofing materials from mid-century houses, which was episode 2002 if you missed that one on the proper lighting choices and how to use lighting effectively in mid-century homes.
That was episode 2004 and 2006 and then I just spontaneously decided to do a pair on furniture 2010 and 2012 last week’s episode. So next week, I am meeting another request by talking about the right kind of window coverings for a mid-century home, and the answer is going to depend on your style as a more mid-century vintage or more mid-century modern.
So stay tuned for that next week, and for now, have an excellent week of potentially playing outside in your yard around your mid-century home and maybe making a few moves towards an outdoor room of your own.