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Simple Pleasures: 9 Ways to Get Cozy Outside This Fall

Crisp mornings, colorful foliage and the impulse to squeeze the most from waning daylight hours add up into a bundle of great reasons to enjoy your outdoor spaces and rooms this fall. From outside dinner parties into s’mores around the fire pit, the following ideas are supposed to inspire you to take advantage of your area and, most important, enjoy those small found pockets of time. Email can wait — but the fall leaves are going fast!

Don Ziebell

1. Gather round the outside fireplace. Fall is the perfect time for making use of an outside fireplace — and much better if it’s situated on a covered porch. Finish your outdoor room with a natural-fiber (or natural-fiber-seem) carpeting and outside couches with loads of pillows. A chandelier and bud of new flowers would make just-right finishing touches.

Atmosphere Design Group

2. Host an all-out formal dinner celebration outside. Actually if it’s chilly, folks can cozy up in tightly spaced seats around a very long table. By the time your guests are seated, candles and lanterns are lit, and wine was poured, the mood is sure to be festive. Drape a throw on the back of every seat and encourage visitors to cozy up if they feel chilly.

Marcia Prentice Photography

3. Cozy up seats with sheepskins. Real or faux; it doesn’t matter. The purpose is to put something deliciously thick and fluffy between you and cold, hard chair. Faux-fur throws, folded lengthwise, would do the job well, too.

Crisp Architects

4. Start with a brisk walk in the fresh air. There’s no better way to love a crisp day than having a refreshing walk, preferably in a scenic area. Try planning your walking path to pass with a horse farm or a apple orchard, or simply walk on your neighborhood, noticing things you usually zip by in the car. Once your cheeks are rosy, retire into a porch or back deck having a mug of warm apple cider and put your feet up.

Ridge Creek Custom Homes

5. Keep a well-lit porch. There’s something so tempting about a porch lit with warm, glowing light; you almost can not help but sit down and relax for a spell. Aim to have at least three sources of light — a pair of sconces and an overhead fixture, for instance. But you might also borrow light from inside your house by means of transom windows over the doorway, and by maintaining indoor colors up as you are out sitting.

Wendi Young Design

6. Create a warm glow with candles. Use actual column candles or the battery-operated kind — the most important issue is to use them in prosperity. They won’t supply the identical kind of warmth as a fire, but you may be amazed at how just considering flickering candlelight can cause you to feel warmer.

John Hummel & Associates Custom Builders

7. Embrace the semioutdoors. An indoor-outdoor area with sliding barn doors to help curb the temperature would be a fantasy place to amuse and hang out from.

Rick O’Donnell Architect

8. Create your own camp experience. A built in fire pit is the perfect gathering area for late-night chats, family campouts and post-dinner-party drinks. For a more rustic appearance, chop your own old logs to DIY seats and place up them in a ring round the fire pit in a remote corner of your yard. Obviously, s’mores are mandatory.

How to Produce a stacked-stone fire pit

Crisp Architects

9. Build outdoor time in your everyday routine. Whether you’ve got an outside fireplace, a fire pit, a back deck or a cozy small porch, the main issue is it’s well used and loved. Therefore, in the event that you find you haven’t been getting out there as far as you would like, consider if during your day you can sneak in a bit of outside R&R. Take your mug of coffee out to the porch every morning, or catch up with your partner over a glass of wine by the fire after work … just get out there and enjoy!

Tell us : Where is your favorite outdoor spot for relaxing? What would you love to add to your outdoor room to make it even more appealing?

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Spring Duvet Fix-Ups: 6 Ways to Light Your Outdoor Space

Enhance these long, leisurely evenings on the terrace with the ideal lighting. From subtle landscape lighting and string lights that cast a gentle glow to sconces, pendants and more, these thoughts will help ignite your imagination and strategy that perfect patio.

Nick Noyes Architecture

1. String Lights

Nothing could beat the soft, luminous light of café-style lights strung overhead, and as they’re so cheap, you may use them liberally without denting your budget.

Great to know: make certain to choose outdoor-rated string lights. LED bulbs will last almost forever, but incandescent bulbs can give you that signature glow glow. Solar string lights are a wonderful option if you want to hang them away from a socket.

More manners with string lighting

FormLA Landscaping, Cassy Aoyagi

A note on additional outlets. Having adequate exterior outlets is essential for hanging string lights, lanterns and more (unless they are solar powered). Make the investment in outside outlets instead of running cords through a cracked window not only will your house be safer, but you’ll have the ability to choose exactly where you want the sockets to go.

Great to know: If you reside in an older house, your outside outlets might not have up-to-date security features, so think about having them updated. All outside electrical outlets need to have a ground-fault circuit interrupter (GFCI) and a weatherproof box cap to keep the socket protected.

Gast Architects

2. Sconces

Sconces are a great option if you want to cast a glow on an open terrace.

Great to know A lantern-style fixture will cast a larger glow than mounted flush against the house, so consider opting for something larger than you might use on, say, the front porch.

Urban Landscape

3. Landscape Lighting

Not just for the backyard, low-voltage landscape lighting may ramp up the ambience of your patio.

Great to know: Generally inadequate to light up an outside space by itself, landscape lighting may work well along with sconces or string lighting. Try a couple of low lights in bushes enclosing the terrace or illuminating a pathway.

Because picture lighting is reduced voltage, this is a comparatively simple and secure DIY project, should you choose to give it a whirl.

Elizabeth Dinkel

4. Pendant Lights

Few things state outside space quite as elegantly as a well-placed pendant light.

Great to know: If you decide to replace an present overhead fixture on your own, be certain the new fixture is similar in weight to the old one — if it’s much thicker, a pro might need to devote a brand new junction box that may take the additional weight.

Cornerstone Architects

5. Recessed Lighting

Simple and sleek, recessed lighting are perfect tucked to the covered terrace of a contemporary or contemporary home.

Great to know: Dimmer switches allow you to adjust the lighting to perfectly suit the mood — along with a dimmer is some thing you can do yourself.

Frankel Building Group

Extend dinnertime using a well-lit outside kitchen. In case your grilling area is separate from the patio seating area, think about subtly linking the twozones using lighting. Direct lighting is much more important from the kitchen zone than mood, so go to get a overhead option, such as recessed lighting or flexible fixtures that may be pointed exactly where you want them to proceed.

Karen Garlanger Designs, LLC

6. Stair Riser Lights

This little touch can add ambience and prevent falls.

Great to know: Having just a couple of measures can actually cause more injuries than a taller staircase. Especially at dusk, that only step can be easy to miss, so including a mild is a kind thing to do.

Jobe Corral Architects

Inform us Will you be adding lighting to your patio this spring? Which manner of lighting is your favorite?

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Color Makes Its Mark on Modern House Exteriors

Contemporary architecture and its architects have been seen as being fearful of color. An individual can trace the dearth of color to the famous 1932 International Style exhibition and book from the Museum of Modern Art; buildings with whitewashed walls were preferred over the others, along with the black and white photographs meant that any color that did exist wasn’t expressed.

Le Corbusier’s oft-quoted stating that “architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light,” was likewise translated to mean that white forms and airplanes were best suited to the sun’s light and shadows. Richard Meier is 1 architect obviously affected by Le Corbusier’s purist stage (white buildings such as Villa Savoye), and he said in his acceptance speech for its 1984 Pritzker Prize which “the whiteness of white isn’t just white; it’s practically always changed by light and that which is shifting.”

But the white structures are only 1 strand of contemporary architecture; even Villa Savoye has green outside walls on the ground floor. Architects like Luis Barragán along with the Eameses went so far as to saturate their own buildings color to impact the occupants’ moods. Another strand of contemporary architecture — in which white light is divided into its rainbow of colors — has found influence these decades later, as cladding materials (metals, fiber cement, resins) are providing architects a huge array of colors to choose from beyond the natural colors of brick, stone and other materials. This ideabook takes a trip through the ROYGBIV rainbow, watching how color might enliven the exteriors of modern homes. An identical ideabook on contemporary interiors will follow.

A.GRUPPO Architects – Dallas

If one color stands out the most amongst grass and trees, it’s red. This three-bedroom addition to a two-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Texas is covered in cement board panels from Ferrari red.

Urban Improvement Company

The preceding home stands out from the landscape; this one does something similar on its block from St. Louis, through variations in crimson.

Princeton Architectural Press

Color helps give a contemporary house its own identity among other contemporary homes, such as these green-built homes in Syracuse, New York.

Cablik Enterprises

The orange outside of the overlook outside Atlanta is just another illustration of standing out among the trees. With its balance of indoor (left) and outside (right) space, the orange overlook frames the green trees all around.

Kevin Daly Architects

Los Angeles is definitely 1 locale that is more receptive to color than many. Stucco gives a blank canvas for applying color, as this sculptural orange home reveals.

Intexure Architects

Shade doesn’t have to cover each surface. This home in Houston is different shades of gray, upon which an orange band was inserted over the garage; the little area creates a large impact.

Prentiss Balance Wickline Architects

Selective color, and its connection to a background color, has a large influence in this Seattle home. Window frames, spandrel panels and doors have been painted orange against gray stucco.

MGS Architecture

Color can be used to create identity within one building, like this two-family building in Los Angeles with one unit in light crimson and one in orange. Be aware that the corrugated metal is oriented vertically on the left and vertically on the right for additional distinction.

GMK Architecture Inc

The earthy tones of this wood and stone in this home in Wisconsin are heightened from the dark yellow walls on both sides of the entrance.

Mohler + Ghillino Architects

This renovated house in Seattle has layers of stone, yellow plywood panels and beige siding. The plywood extends inside to give the house some heat.

OKB Architecture

We started this ideabook with reddish and, unsurprisingly, with green the result differs. This addition appears to rise from the ground (not set itself apart from it), moving from dark green in the base to light green over.

Bushman Dreyfus Architects

This “abstracted farmhouse” outside Washington, D.C., gains a number of its abstraction in the stucco outside and its pastel green color. The home manages to stand out in the landscape with no tactic of comparison.

Robert Nebolon Architects

And what might be more appropriate for the color of a houseboat than blue?

FLOCK ARCHITECTURE

Color can be used to heighten the feeling of thickness, as darker colors recede. As an instance in point, the green front enriches the push of the house in San Diego toward the sidewalk, while the purple recedes.

Castanes Architects PS

But why pay for a couple of colors? As Charles and Ray Eames, Luis Barragán, Gerrit Rietveld and others have revealed, selective use of color can do a lot. This ocean escape in the Pacific Northwest features splashes of yellow, blue and red against a mostly gray exterior. The gray makes the other colors appear much more powerful, turning the escape into a three-dimensional abstract painting.

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