Outdoor Living Room

Today, when building costs make large houses prohibitive, one way to extend your house is to use your outdoor space to full advantage. And many contemporary houses make many a room look larger by visually extending it into the lawn or garden. Tricks such as glass walls, using the same wall material inside as for a continuing wall on the terrace and using the same material for the ceiling inside as on the extended terrace eaves, help to do this. Your living room or dining room and even your bed­room or your children's bedrooms can flow right outdoors on to "float­ing" decks of wood, bricked ter­races or sodded, lattice-roofed log­gias.

However you do it, with the aid of vine, fences, shrubbery, shade trees and flowers you can make your terrace a delightful place for entertaining, sun-bathing and relax­ing. With a barbecue another di­mension is added, for with your own fireplace or barbecue any ter­race, lawn or garden spot can offer the blithe enchantments of dining under sun and stars.

In planning your terrace, con­sider installing an electric outlet for lighting, portable radio, electric spit for your barbecue, etc. Use vines for a lattice roof (grape vines, for instance, leaf out late when shade is wanted and drop their leaves early at the beginning of cool weather, giving delicious fruit as bonus). Choose a rapid-growing vine like grape, hyacinth or the gourd vine.

Relate your terrace to the rest of your grounds with flowers and vines grown in pots, baskets and tubs. If the wall of the house next to your terrace seems bare or the profile of your cement or asphalt paving seems too sharp in contrast against the grass, soften the line with pots of plants. Have dwarf trees on your terrace and blossom­ing shrubs in the terrace-retaining walls. Create interest with changes of level; build flower beds around trees, steps and walls.

For a terrace where everybody in the family assembles, have play space for young children, a sand box which can later be filled with plants, or a little square pool for sailing small boats (this can create a sense of luxury long after the children are grown up).

You need not rely on trees alone for shade. Construct a self-bracing terrace roof in an egg-crate design, using the side of your house and wood, masonry or metal pillars. Corrugated plastic and reinforced glass are in frequent use nowadays because they are watertight, yet let the sunlight through.

Coming into more and more architectural use — particularly in hot climates—is the "parasol" roof, extending from the walls of the house some 4 feet and even more to give pleasant shade to the sur­rounding area. Since glare reflected on bare grounds is a source of heat, a carpet of shaded grass under the parasol roof helps to keep the house cool.

Often an outdoor living space gets twice the use if it is made more accessible. A window in a living room can be converted to a French door, making it more natural to step right out on the terrace instead of walking around the house to reach it. A terrace that is an extension of a narrow porch—a paved area ad­joining the porch—will make the porch that much more livable. A flagstone path—or any other path— leading to a terrace away from the house will increase the usefulness of the terrace. Some kind of hard flooring is of prime importance, whether it is of brick, crushed rock, cement, wood block, or flagstone, for it makes it easier to move the furniture around and eliminates worries over tramped-on turf. In fact, it is a good idea to have a ter­race in a spot where you are having trouble with the lawn.

Outdoor living space is success­ful, too, when it is sheltered—away from street noises and traffic, from the neighbors, from the wind. An unused corner of the house or the garage, with the aid of fences and walls, can turn into a sun trap that will stretch out the season for out­door living both in spring and fall. A louvered board fence, a basket-weave fence, asbestos laid in ce­ment to form a modern wall, or the traditional brick wall, all are pleas­ant backgrounds for planting and good screens against wind and other disturbing elements.

Play Area

A play area that will keep your young children in their own back yard, where you can keep an occa­sional eye on them, need not be an unattractive one. Include a paved area, if possible, for bicycle riding, skating, hopscotch, etc. The sand­box might be a sunken one, flush with the lawn, or it might be a raised box, an extension of a wall or fence that can be planted later. Such imaginative ideas as hollow­ing out and painting an old stump to be used for a puppet theatre; getting hold of an unseaworthy row-boat which can be gaily decorated for playing Robinson Crusoe; or putting up a ladder for climbing the side of the tool shed or a garden wall, so that climbing in other areas may be out-of-bounds, are ideas that will keep the "gang" at your house.

Plan to have your drying yard and service area out of sight yet close enough to the house so that you are not inconvenienced. Screen these areas with shrubbery or fen­ces. The service area should include propagating beds, coldframes, a tool shed or storage locker and your compost pit if you have one. Hot­beds and coldframes should be lo­cated in a spot where they will be Protected from north and north­west winds. Be careful not to place your coldframe in a damp place unless you have first drained it thoroughly with drain tile.

A vegetable garden can be a source of great enjoyment. It should be out of sight in a corner, or screened with shrubbery, be­cause of the seasons when there is nothing growing in it. But it can be a decorative addition to the gar­den, particularly if there are grass walks and attractive flowers around it.

Paths and Walks

Planning your driveway and walks so that they take up a mini­mum amount of room and yet pro­vide a strong enough surface for the traffic they will bear, calls for careful thinking. The well-designed house and grounds have the garage close to the house and near to the street. The garage situated way in back of the house is a hangover from horse-and-buggy days when the stable had to be remote from the house. Today when the majority of home owners have cars, space can be saved by using a garage path that also serves as the house path, or feeds into a short house walk. But though the driveway can be a short one, plan for off-street parking— have your driveway at least 20 feet from the street.

Most home driveways break down under heavy service trucks and traffic because the soil under the driveway is wet. Adequate drainage for wet spots, therefore, is a necessity. Good driveway ma­terials are stable, and should not get washed away by storms or shoveled up with snow. If, however, the driveway must be long and does form an important feature of your landscaping, a stable material may have to be passed up in favor of one like gravel or crushed rock, which will blend better with the surroundings.

Well-designed walks with neat edgings, steps which seem to be-long where they are placed, and intriguing little paths that lead you deeper into the garden, can do much to improve your grounds. You can scarcely lay too much emphasis on your selection of material. Con­crete paths and steps, for example, while often just the right thing, can form too sharp a contrast with the surrounding turf and planting. Informal walks of wood butts (per­haps slices of telephone poles), flagstones, or tanbark may be much more suitable. Colonial houses are traditionally set off by brick; mod­ern houses favor wood; small hous­es seem to call for flags.

Garden Pools and Fountains

Water, in almost any form, en­riches a garden and delights the senses. Modern houses are bringing garden pools right into the patios and terraces. Ideal is water in move­ment, a splashing fountain or a nar­row little brook running through the grounds and between flowers over clear stones. But even a spigot with a wooden bucket below it or a tub to fill with water and use for plunging cut flowers can bring a verdant, cool feeling into the gar­den. Using the sound of running water and the evaporative qualities of a fountain or pool to bring re­lief from the heat is a trick we have learned from the gardens of Japan, Spain and other hot climates.
A pool in the garden highlights the good features of your setting, and it should always be placed so that its surface will be seen from several points, or at least from the most frequented spot in the garden.

The shape and materials of the coping around the pool have much to do with its appropriateness in the setting. Flagstone, brick and tile are all good depending on the degree of formality of the pool. Sometimes the best solution is no visible cop­ing.

Fountains can be made with only a small supply of flowing water, and the same water can be used over and over if you install a small motor and pump for an elec­tric pumping system.

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