How much is your house open to the flow between spaces? How much do you want it to be!?
Because when you think of gorgeous high end mid century, you probably think of a glass wall separating living room from a patio in an enclosed California backyard. Or you about a sunken living room that invites you down from the formal entry.
If thinking about designs like that makes you feel like you can’t have nice things … don’t despair. There are ways to improve the flow in every mid-century home, no matter how modest.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Cornerstones of Mid Mod Design Series
This is one of a five-part series on the Mid Mod Update Design Cornerstones. If you’ve ever wanted to know HOW to add a little more Mid Mod charm to your home … start here. Make sure you listen to all four so that you can:
- Keep your house balanced while you play with ASYMMETRY
- Choose the right SIMPLE SHAPES to keep those clean modern lines
- Highlight a MIX OF MATERIALS to make your home shine
- Add or enhance the FLOW BETWEEN SPACES (in and around your home)
- Pull it all together with a listener Q&A
Grab my easy Mid Mod Update Design Cornerstones guide to make it easy!

Find YOUR Flow
You can choose your own adventure when it comes to how open and flowing, or closed and private, your home is.
Amazing flow from one space to the next and out into the yard is definitely a feature of high-end mid-century homes. But it can also be a feature of your (and my!) simple, builder-grade ranch.
In fact, if you look closely, you may already see some of the high end concepts in your ranch. That glass wall? A picture window or sliding glass door. A (level) living room with a wide opening instead of a door. A fireplace of the same Roman brick on the front facade in the living room.
In the mid-century, life was shifting to a more casual, open pattern than in past eras and we’ve only continued in that direction. A kitchen without a door was much more “open concept” than past kitchens, but doesn’t quite do it for many of us moderns.
Your mid-century home can transform to fit the demands of modern life and stay true to its mid-century roots…all it takes is some planning!
What’s great about flow between spaces?
The flowing spaces of a mid-century home are wonderful for encouraging casual freewheeling interiors (and exteriors) that work well with our modern lifestyle.
Encourage flow in your home update.
This is a choose-your-own-adventure scenario. How much you open up the spaces within and around your home depends on your taste, your yard, your climate and your lifestyle. But there is always a benefit to opening up some interior walls of your home to make it seem larger with long diagonal sight lines.
Connecting the flow between your inside spaces and the adjacent deck, patio or yard beyond lets you borrow living area without paying for an addition!
Watch a quick lesson on creating flow between spaces:
Or listen to the full podcast episode on
Watch all the Cornerstone videos on Instagram
Resources to help you design the cornerstones into your remodel
- Grab the Cornerstones Workbook.
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Learn how to get ready to remodel by watching my FREE Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)”, ON DEMAND.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
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
When we think about gorgeous high-end mid-century homes, one of the first things that pops to mind is an amazing flow between spaces. And between the inside of the house and the outside. You might think of a glass wall separating a living room from a patio and an enclosed California backyard. Or you think of a sunken living room that flows from the formal entry.
When you have these ideas in mind, you’re thinking about the highest-end versions of mid-century design. But you can use the same concept flow between spaces and the most modest of builder-grade mid-century ranch houses in the Midwest, I promise. Let’s talk about how. Hey there, welcome back to mid mod remodel. 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 1504.
So here we are in the odd week between Christmas and New Year’s, Are you perhaps experiencing a little bit of downtime. This is one of the most reliably non working times in our hyper work focused American culture. Of course, if you have kids home from school right now, you might be experiencing the opposite of downtime. But perhaps the greater than usual desire to make some changes in your life is still in play.
As you countdown to the New Year’s Eve Countdown, why not make a New Year’s resolution you can actually keep to make some real change in your home this year. And keep it because I’ll be helping you out. I’ve got a simple way to do just that in our still shiny new mini planning course master plan in a month. This mini course boils down the most essential elements of the masterplan method into a few concise and actionable exercises you can do on your own or with your partner to streamline and step you up to the next quality level in your mid modern model.
When you’re short on time, the last thing you want to do is wasted. So let me show you the best least steps to a good plan. Or if you want to go a little deeper, the ready to remodel program is ready and waiting for you links to both of those options are in the show notes page. Plus, if you haven’t grabbed our free cornerstones of madman design guide yet in the last three episodes, you can grab it there too.
Remember, these Cornerstone episodes were originally an Instagram Live series intended to point to one of my earliest mid-century design clinics, the mid-century outdoor spaces clinic to be exact. If I’ve gotten you curious about that material, you can purchase and watch the recording of that formerly live event. Now it might not seem like the most optimal moment to plan a patio, but maybe you want to dream of spring. The link for that will also be in the show notes, which you’ll find at mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1504.
Today, we’re wrapping up the fourth of four cornerstones of mid mod design. That is asymmetry, simple shapes, a practical mix of materials and flow between spaces. And then tomorrow, I hope you’re going to come back and we’ll be talking about how to pull all of these things together by using the masterplan method to plan a great remodel for your house whether you’re making big changes or small ones.
If you’re watching this in the replay, I hope you take the time to go ahead and grab the Cornerstones workbook which summarizes everything we’ve been talking about all week. You can get it from the link in my bio or go to midnight dash midwest.com/cornerstones. Put your email in and I’ll send you a copy to your inbox. If you’re here live. Hello, welcome. Great to have you. Pull up a chair metaphorically. And feel free to ask questions as we go along or state your opinion for the record.
Here’s one to get us going right off the bat. Are you pro or con, open plan floor plans? We’ll be getting into this again in a minute. But I want to give you a chance to throw your opinion into the hat. Do you like open plan floor plans or do not? There’s not a right answer here by the way. But before we get into the design topic of today, I want to ask are you signed up yet for the mid-century design clinic happening a week from Saturday, it’s going to be an amazing event two hours, we’re going to use the steps of the master plan process to workshop decks, patios and other outside spaces adjacent to a mid-century house.
This is a perfect example of where the flow between spaces is a really important design feature. And we’ll be applying those principles to your house in real time. It’s not a lecture, it’s a class and I want you to bring your tape measure and your thinking cap and we will work on a design for your house together. We did this last winter for kitchens and we had an amazing result. People actually had some wonderful brainstorms for their kitchens in real time, and some of them followed up and joined us in the ready to remodel program. So I hope I’ll see you there. You can get your tickets for the early bird price now for the end of the weekend. See you next Saturday.
Okay, let’s talk about the flow between spaces. Who’s got an opinion? Open plan? Yes, open plan. No. The concept of flow between spaces is really important in mid-century houses and it was a differentiation from the houses that had come before. earlier eras of houses tended to have a lot more separation between different rooms in the house different types of space in the house. Bedrooms were always upstairs. Kitchens were closed off at the back of the house, sometimes a separate even add on room. They were designed to contain smells and heat but also to keep the people that worked in kitchen, often a daily servant, even in a middle-class home out of the flow of regular life. In the mid-century era, people start okay love a modified open floorplan. Thanks, Denise.
In the mid-century era, the prevailing design was more middle-class people were living more casually, they were having more flow between spaces. They weren’t necessarily having members and not have the family in the house on a daily basis. And so the social spaces of the house tended to all be open to themselves. Even in a builder-grade mid-century ranch house, the kitchen usually doesn’t have a door between the kitchen and the dining room, even if it has a doorway.
And in other layouts of houses. Sometimes, even in the early mid-century houses you had flow, if not between the kitchen and the full on living room, then between an eating area, or a casual den or out to the backyard. At the same time, this sort of design DNA of the branch house that we think of today came out of California, where there will be influenced by California, whether it made sense to just sort of open up the house to the outside and let things flow in back and forth. Even in less clement weather conditions. Many below-grade mid-century houses were very small.
Again, this was a time when we were trying to answer housing crisis and get as many people into houses as possible. When the houses were really small, it made sense to flow right out onto a patio. Because there might not be a space for everyone to come around for a father or a family gathering and pull up chairs together in the kitchen, you got to flow right outside the house. This was also the era when the prevailing parenting philosophy was kick your kids outside after breakfast and tell them to come back for lunch and then see them again at dinner. We don’t do it that way today. But the concept is there.
The other thing that was really changing the way people’s houses felt was the structure of houses was changing. Not every house not, for example, this house, but many, many entry era houses were built not of walls with a roof sitting on top of it. But if posts and beams and once you have the roof being held up not by walls, but by columns, then you don’t necessarily have to have such a solid wall between the inside of the house and the outside, especially if you’re in a temperate climate, you might choose to dissolve more and more of that wall from brickstone, drywall, clapboard into glass and get more natural light vision and other things that are coming from the outside of the house.
So all of these factors started to influence the way that people in the mid-century era were building their houses. And they all worked wonderfully with the more casual style of living that we still use today. We’re not necessarily hosting formal dining events in the dining room every evening we’re eating in front of the TV, we’re wandering around the house with shoes on, you know this, the way that we live in our houses today is much better suited to houses built in the mid-century era than it is to houses built in any other era.
So what does the flow between spaces and a mid-century house look like? How does it take form? Obviously, it picture you picture sort of glass walls between the back den of the house and the backyard beyond it. This is a sort of high end design. If you looked at the photos that I posted my Instagram slider today choose your favorite flow between spaces. These are like an entire wall made out of glass or a wall made out of glass windows and you’ve got sort of a fireplace wall made out of stone that then turns into an exterior wall made out of stone and it just flows right out giving you the sense that there’s really not much difference between the contained living room space on one side of the glass, and the patio courtyard space on the other. It also looks like I’m
starting to dissolve the lines of walls inside of the house. So you might see a dining room area that’s just one different ceiling height or different set of walls around it but not separated from the other parts of the house. It might seem like an entire social area that’s entirely open concept floorplan in a high end house. If you live in a builder grade Ranch, like I do, you’ll still see these ideas showing up.
And in this case, the flow between spaces will look like a picture window, a sliding glass door, a doorway between the kitchen and the dining room that doesn’t have a door in it and never had one. Which of these sounds like more like you who’s living in a high end glorious, mid mod design house and who’s living in a builder grade Ranch, Delta grade ranch. They’re all coming in. I will not bite I promise. So if you’re following along in the workbook, this is the place where I want you to take stock how open or closed is your house right now who feels like their house is as open as they would like it to be? Who would like their house to be more connected inside spaces? Easier passage between your bedroom areas and the more social space in the house? Yeah, builder grade. Same.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t incorporate some of these design features into our house. Basically, what you want to do is think about what are the features we see in a high design house and then how can we take the concepts of them and bring them home to ourselves? Okay, great bytes project you love closed houses and that’s fine. Every couple of months you’ll see an article go around the internet that it’s like the open plan is dead or open plan concepts forever.
Certainly, during the shutdown, at the beginning of the pandemic, we heard a lot of people saying, my open plan house is hell, or I could never live in an open plan house, there is a really great design solution. If you would like to live in a house that’s more open. But you need some separation, you need a place to go away and take a work call, you need a place for TV to happen so that everyone in the entire house isn’t hearing the same TV, I would point you towards the work of designer Sarah Susanka. She’s an architect who wrote a series of books called the not so big house, remodeling the not so big house and also the yard, building them out to the house. Google for it, you’ll find it.
Her concept of an away room was meant to mitigate this idea of we do like our houses to be more open now. But if you find that there’s no sound separation between any part of the social spaces in the house, that really starts to become very oppressive. And so it’s wonderful, if you’re choosing to go with a more open concept house, to make sure that you’ve got one social space, not a bedroom, not a person, no belonging to no person in the house, one social room of the house that’s close to the other social spaces in the house. So it’s not stuck down in the basement. But it is auditorily separate from the rest of the house.
And it might be you know, you can determine how perfectly soundproof doesn’t need to be, are we talking like acoustic quality you can do recording inside that space and not out? Or is it just a place where you can go and close the door, but it gives you a chance to depending on your household, that might be the place where people go to be loud, where you go to have an animated conversation. Or it might be the one place where you can go and retreat and find a little quiet, maybe it’s the library in a house full of extroverts. Everybody else is playing their music, different things are happening all around the house and one introvert person needs to go and like have quiet time in the away room.
The weight room can work in either direction. And it’s a really great idea either way to have a space even in a more open concept house that works to the way in my house. Build a grid mid-century Ranch, I have turned my office, I have transformed the nursery bedroom from my house into the office. So there’s a door behind me. This door leads to the kitchen, there’s another door beside me that door leads to the hallway that connects to the other bedrooms. When I moved into this house, I was like that’s the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of that dumb doorway to the kitchen. Why would anyone want a door to the kitchen in the bedroom?
And originally it was built as the nursery so housewife, ideal of the middle of a middle period could like stir the soup and check on the baby at the same time. But I have totally incorporated this door into my house. I love it. Because now it is it functions like a bedroom and has an easy connection to the bathroom. It also opens through to the dining room. But it’s also it’s more of a social room in the house. So this is my away room, I keep all my office clutter in here I have my business meetings in here. And at the end of the day, I can go away and close the doors and know that it’s separated.
And here’s a comment again from Green bytes project. It’s a clutter thing and open floorplan for my family looks like a disaster even with a few things out. Oh my gosh, so much to say for this. I was just talking to a client. It’s Thursday, Tuesday, about plans to bring make a couple of changes to their house to bring more light into their north facing kitchen. They’ve got a super dark kitchen and we were brainstorming a number of strategies they could use to bring in more daylight one light tubes or even a skylight into the kitchen until we were talking about their south facing living room is filled with glowy gorgeous light.
It’s basically lights up all year round into particularly in the winter, when the low slanting light comes in through those large mid-century picture windows and the big light window next to their door, that whole room glows. They want to be able to borrow that glowy warm winter light for the kitchen. But they do not want to see their kitchen clutter from their beautiful living room. Yeah, I mean, same.
So what we ended up coming up with was for them a series of keyhole windows, we could put between the studs without even changing the structure across the top wall of the room. And basically at that point, we’ll be able to let some of that light bounce through bounce off the white ceiling into the kitchen share a little bit of natural light, but no view whatsoever. So they would never have to experience kitchen clutter from the living room. And those two spaces would seem separate.
For another person, they might even want to contain kitchen smells and kitchen sounds that wouldn’t be a good solution for them. But in this case, it was just a question of view. So if you would like to have more openness and flow, but you want to make sure that you’re not ever going to see your kitchen sink from your living room, that’s still something you can do.
One of the things to think about when you’re looking for places to increase the flow between the spaces in your house is to think not just about blowing out all the walls, which can be structurally expensive and it’s perhaps more than you need, but just to expand the feeling of space within certain rooms by creating long diagonal views. So if you sat in a corner of your dining room, you might think about where you look in the house, pretend you’ve got X ray vision and think about if you could see through a wall, what would you see, you don’t want to look, you don’t want a window into a bedroom that’s violating house privacy.
You don’t want a window that looks at your kitchen sink. But you might think about opening up a doorway, to the front entry to a any room in the house that’s brightly lit. views to give you a window connection out to the backyard from the dining room, wherever you’re thinking about the house feeling to close down, you think about where can I create a long diagonal view or a view to a window to bring extra daylight extra natural light and extra long views to make a small house feel bigger.
And the other thing you want to do in a mid-century house is connect the inside of your house with the outside of your house, which you can do in a couple of different ways. We talked about looking for diagonal views, and we talked about aligning walkways with Windows. But there’s a number of ways you can make the inside of your house feel more connected to the outside. The most obvious one is with glass, you can put in more windows, if you have a window, you can extend it down to the floor and have a full height window or you can change it into a glass door. If you have a picture window, you can change it into a sliding door.
Basically, anywhere you’ve got some glass, you can add more. At the same time, you can think about what you want to do, not just to create a view to outside but a feeling of connection to outside. So think about what’s adjacent with your outside spaces in your inside spaces. At the front of the house, your front entry is probably connected to your front porch, that through the front door. And you want to think about for you Are you a social person is your neighborhood a social neighborhood.
One thing that’s really been very popular among my design clients right now is the concept of a front deck, often with a little bit of a wraparound sitting bench or a place to sit. So people can go out their front door and sit there with a cup of coffee or a drink in the evening wave with their neighbors as they go by. And it’s a lovely way to engage with the neighborhood. I’m way too introverted and have way too reactive dog to make that work for me.
But for some of my clients, it’s actually they would rather work on their front porch on a front deck than they would on a back patio. On the other hand, for a lot of people what they prefer is to create a wonderful enclosing outdoor space at the back of their house.
And then you have to think about adjacency What do you want that to connect to? For some people, you actually want your back patio, a small back patio, maybe your only back patio or deck to connect to the bedroom, the owners bedroom, it particularly if it’s an addition on owner suite that’s been pushed off the back of the house, you might use that to create a little enclosing protected L and make that kind of a private space for the owners of the house for the parents in the house to step outside and have a little private space at the back of the house. Much more common.
There’s not really a value here. But another great idea of adjacency in the backyard is you probably want connection between your backyard deck patio and your kitchen where the food is being prepared and door a den space. So you can kind of in nice weather flow right in and out from hanging out casually in the den at the back of the house right out into the backyard.
Having a sense of adjacency putting your backyard outside spaces at the right place on the house, not smack up against someone’s bedroom window. But instead close to access doors to the kitchen and to social spaces in the house really makes a difference. Another way you can make connections between the inside and the outside of the house. Without any glass or any visual connection whatsoever is materiality.
We’ve talked about the practical mix of materials yesterday, when we were doing our live on that cornerstone and creating a similar material or the same material that happens inside your house and outside your house. It’s a wonderful way to create a connection between spaces, even if you never see the two at the same time. Some of the examples in my Instagram story today have literally the same stone in a fireplace wall extending right out and becoming an exterior wall of the house.
But you can also do the same thing. If you have just a little bit of decorative brick along the front of your modest mid-century ranch house here in the Midwest, forming a little bit of a new wall, you might find the same kind of brick is happening in your fireplace, that visual connection, even if you can’t stand anywhere and see them at the same time creates a psychological connection between inside and out. If you can source more of that same brick, that same stone whatever that material is from a local quarry from a restore from a demolition site and put that in other places in and around your house. You continue that feeling of repetition and connection between the spaces.
The other thing you can do to expand the interior feeling of your house by borrowing space from the outside without even as much as an exterior deck is to extend the eave line of your house either all the way around it or just in a few key places. Basically if you stand inside your house next to a window and when you look up you see the ceiling above you and then out side you see the continuing ceiling line at the soffit of your house. You’ve expanded the psychological space, the psychological bubble of your house beyond the exterior wall of the house, you’ll experience this most on a rainy or snowy day, as you stand at the edge of the window, the rain isn’t following strict falling straight down along the wall of the house is falling in a curtain outside set off from the house by however deep your eave line is that space isn’t something you can furnish, it isn’t something you have to heat, it isn’t something you can necessarily stand in without going outside and around the whole house.
But it’s making your house bigger. That psychological connection between inside and outside can be created with things that are happening of your head, as well as things that are happening at the floor. And then anytime we talked about materiality, anytime you’ve got an inside space and an outside space next to each other, you want to think about ways you can either have the same material happening in and out, or familiar ones.
So if you’ve got a wood floor inside the house, and you’re gonna have a wooden deck outside the house, think about when you’re choosing stain colors for that deck, trying to match the same color to the wood floor that’s happening inside. Now you’re not going to make it look like it’s the exact same type of wood. But having that feeling of if you squint, you see the same field of color, the same sort of tone of wood happening right through the sliding glass door.
Suddenly, these two faces feel more adjacent more connected to each other than they otherwise would. It’s also important the way that you design that outside space to really help it feel like it’s being borrowed to the inside space. If it just if you just have a patio that flows up from your house, and all of a sudden it stops and it turns into grass that feels more clearly like here’s the inside of your house. Here’s the wall. Here’s the patio, it’s all outside.
But if you surround that patio with a low knee wall with a bench with a planter so that it has a distinct corner, you’re borrowing you’re connecting that space back, when you enclose that space slightly, it suddenly becomes a room of its own. And there’s an extent to which as you stand inside a den, look out through a sliding glass door at a boundary patio or deck, you feel like you’re standing in both spaces, like you include the outside space as part of your inside space. Instead of having two small squares, you’ve got one long rectangle, instead of having two wide rectangles next to each other, you’ve got one large square, the whole space starts to tie together.
And even though you might have to open the sliding glass door, open the screen, keep your mosquito barrier intact, you still are feeling more like the two spaces flow together. And you’re inviting yourself to just step outside, giving yourself foot friendly services giving yourself a little bit of overhead protection. So you can step outside even just a little bit beyond the house while it’s raining. While it’s snowing. These kinds of effects to encourage you to come outside are the things that really make a difference to whether you’re going to use your deck or patio, once a summer when you have a party or literally every single day Every morning as part of your routine.
So yeah, creating a sense of flow out of materiality, creating a sense of flow out of enclosed, protected spaces outside with a little bit of overhead protection and a little bit of boundary. Just to give you it’s not a full wall, you’re not creating a screen porch with your deck, you’re just although screen porches are also great for the same thing. You’re just creating another level of layering that this is a room in your house, this is room by your house. And beyond that as yard beyond that is outside.
Alright. I’ve been talking for 22 minutes, and I need a drink. But I want to know if you have any questions about creating outside spaces before I let you go. And if not, then I’m going to be talking to you tomorrow about how to use the masterplan method to bring all of these ideas together and bring them to bear on your entire home remodel or whatever project is next on this year’s to do list. If it’s going to be a patio deck or other outdoors outside space, I want you to come to the mid-century design clinic, we’re going to have so much fun, and it’s just incredibly valuable.
Also, if you have any questions about joining the ready to remodel program, this is your perfect preview of what we do, what that process feels like. And the whole alumni of the ready to remodel Cohort One and Cohort Two will be attending that class so you can meet them and ask them how it was. I’m not seeing any questions or comments show up so I’m going to sign off for now. But this week has been such a delight to dig into the cornerstones of mid mod design with you. And we’ll be coming back to them over and over and over again. This is going to be something that I continue to answer your questions about and continue to talk about as we plan great mid-century style remodels for your mid-century house.
Oh before I go on more questions Sophie’s asking struggling with lighting outside the place has zero. All right. Let’s talk about outside lighting. So there’s a couple of different ways you want to use lighting. This is actually interesting. I was just talking to a client this morning about choosing new lights for their or interior space, they’re doing a bit of a gut remodel in their kitchen and dining room area. And so they’re coming back. They’re contractors asking them to put in a lot of cam lights, which obviously is very practical.
But as I was telling them this morning, it’s not just a matter of cam lights, you can’t, you won’t create a great mid-century vibe in a room just with can lights, they’re too generalized, you want to think about for what purpose do you want lights. So while I’m encouraging them to go ahead and put camera lights into their kitchen area, and into the living room as well, because sometimes you want to throw a party, sometimes you want to clean at night, sometimes you do you want to have a completely generally brightly lit space. Sometimes you want to create pools of light, you want to create a sort of a gathering area around a light in the evening.
So the same is true for outside lighting. You want to think about what you’re doing. Are you reading on your deck? Patio porch? Are you hosting parties? Is it mostly just you is that you and your family? Are you dining out there? What activities are you trying to light? Then you can think about what are the task lights that might work? I mean, the level one solution is just to get some sort of candles or lanterns, electric lanterns that you can place as you need for certain popsicles for certain possibilities. It’s always easier to attach lighting if it’s gonna be wired into the house.
So you can think about sconce lights that attach to your exterior walls and point outwards. But those don’t always create the best feeling of space enclosure. Sometimes you can create a sense of an enclosed outside space. Just by stringing a bunch of the cutesy little you can get them on Amazon, sort of dangly Christmas lights, or why am I blanking on the words that sort of, you know, more patio lights that string around, you could string up a shade cloth and then you could follow the line of the shade cloth shape with another string of lights. And basically, you’ve created the boundaries of an outside room with strings and posts.
If you’re thinking about creating beautiful evening spaces, now you also have to think about if you’re in the Midwest, I don’t know that you are if you’re in the Midwest, you got to think about what bugs you attract with lighting. So you may also want to think about keeping lighting rather low. But basically, if you’re thinking about eating outside, I would try to swing and swag some sort of pendant light that will come down relatively centrally over your table.
If you’re trying to have really general light, you might want to have low light that sort of surrounds the patio area, a ground level. That could be solar lights that could be wired, and it could go around the outer boundary. If you’re thinking about hosting parties where people are going to be talking to each other seeing each other’s faces, you want some upper level light that’s happening all the way around.
And if you just want to create a little bit of more light that you see when you’re inside the house out, then you want to go with some low wattage, so you’re not annoying your neighbors sconce lights that sort of shine outwards, unlike the surface the space of your patio or deck. If you have more lighting questions about this send me a DM I’d obviously love to keep talking about it with you.
So flow between spaces is one of the most essential mid-century design elements and often it takes the form between flow inside and out. Now in the dead of winter, particularly here in the Midwest, that might be more hypothetical than actual but we still don’t want to feel cut off from the outside visually.
If you dream about improving the flow to your outside spaces before next summer, you might want to check out the recording of the mid-century outdoor spaces designed clinic find a link to that and a whole bunch of other goodies in the show notes page at midmod-midwest.com/ 1504.
Then next week on the podcast, I’ll be pulling it all together talking you through how to apply these cornerstones to your own home by using drumroll please, a masterclass approach. See you then.