A well-designed outdoor room or alfresco can help you build less, live more, and improve your home’s thermal comfort.

In this episode, I share how to design your outdoor room as a sustainability asset, and how to get it right in your new build or renovation project.

Listen to the episode now.

Hello! This is Episode 432. This is Way #32 of the 44 Ways to Create Your Sustainable Home series, and we’re beginning a new section: Section Seven, A Sustainable Site: Landscape Design.

In the last section, we worked through six criteria for choosing materials, fixtures, and finishes with sustainability in mind. This section shifts focus to your site and your landscape, and how the design of the spaces around your home can be designed with sustainability as your priority.

Way #32 is: Design Your Outdoor Room.

Our wellbeing is greatly enhanced through a connection to light, the outdoors and the natural environment, so bringing this focus into our homes, where we can, will make a big difference to their sustainability. 

Plus, if your climate allows you to be outdoors for some, or a big chunk of the year, this can greatly expand the size, spaciousness and feel of your home too, enabling you to build less, but still achieve great functionality overall.

Early in the ‘44 Ways’ series, we talked about building less as a sustainability measure. The outdoor room is actually a way of building less. Let me explain…

In most Australian climates, and many other locations globally, a well-designed outdoor room or alfresco is a space you can use for most, if not all, of the year. 

And so, a well-designed and well-used outdoor room can reduce the need for additional interior living square meterage. If your outdoor room functions as an extra room for most of the year, you may not need that additional lounge room or that extended kitchen-living footprint.

It’s become the status quo in many home builds and renovations to include two internal living spaces. In some cases, there are three. 

However, a really functional, well-designed outdoor living space, that can be used for a large part of the year, can reduce the load on your internal floor area.

It can help you utilise all of your site, rather than just the part of it that’s within the walls of your home.

I’ve had homeowners who’ve looked at the treatment of their outdoor room and added external blinds and even external heating or electric fireplaces, so they can truly use it year-round, day and night, and make it work really hard for them.

In the warmer times of the year, your outdoor room can greatly assist with how well natural ventilation works in your home. 

An outdoor room can act as a thermal buffer zone between the exposed exterior environment and your home’s interior. When using cross ventilation as a strategy to cool your home in summer and warm it in winter, the way your outdoor room impacts that air adjacent to your home can be super beneficial in improving your home’s thermal comfort.

A well-designed outdoor room with adequate shade and well-considered landscape can actively pre-cooling the air before it enters the home. In Winter, that passively warmed zone just outside your primary living areas can promote warmer air circulation into your home as well.

Getting it right in your outdoor room means designing it correctly, sizing it for the functions you want it to perform, and making it a great indoor / outdoor connection space in your home. Season 2, Episode 11, includes information on how to design your outdoor room or alfresco, with mistakes to avoid and important design considerations.

Additionally, your outdoor room or alfresco area, and how it is roofed, needs to consider how it manages the sun throughout the year, and that requires understanding your orientation and sun angles during the design phase. 

Episode 211 goes into this in detail, and I’d encourage you to listen to it alongside this one. The key point for sustainability is that a roof designed only for summer shade can easily deny your home interior access to the winter sun it needs to warm up naturally.

One of my HOME Method members had this situation with their renovation of their home in Melbourne. They worked with a landscape designer to resolve some specific issues in their rear garden, and as part of this, discussed how their alfresco area would be designed. The landscape designer had suggested the roof be an open design, because they were concerned it would enclose and shade the home’s interior too much in Winter.

The HOME Method members were concerned that, if they did this, it would make the alfresco space unusable in wet weather, and not be as functional a space as it could be. 

We discussed various roof designs, and in the end, they decided to go with a flexible, operable louvred roof structure. That way, they have the option to close it for weather and shade, but can open it to the required angle for sunlight as needed based on the time of year.

Sustainability isn’t purely about low energy or reduced use of resources. 

It’s also about the improvement of your health and wellbeing as you live in your home, and how your home supports and enhances your health and wellbeing.

Research consistently shows that access to nature improves physical and mental wellbeing, reduces stress, and supports cognitive function. 

When you design parts of your home to keep you close to the outside, through an outdoor room that’s genuinely comfortable and frequently used, it makes it simpler and more meaningful for you to enjoy the land around your home.

If you have a block where your house faces north to the street, this can be a challenging orientation in the southern hemisphere, because the sun is moving across the street frontage of your home, and your home will be casting a shadow across your rear yard.

I’ve done a number of designs over the years where, for homes on north-facing blocks, I’ve brought the primary living areas and the outdoor room to the front of the house, on the north side. It requires careful thinking about privacy, streetscape, and how the entry is handled. 

But when you get it right, the living spaces and the outdoor room both face north, they both benefit from a better orientation, and the cross ventilation and solar access that the design is aiming for actually works.

In this Episode, I cover:

• How a well-designed outdoor room lets you build less interior floor space, while adding big lifestyle value to your home
• Why an outdoor room acts as a thermal buffer zone, pre-cools ventilation air, and supports cross ventilation
• How to think about roofing your outdoor room so you shade in summer without burying your interior in winter
• Why your outdoor room is where sustainability meets health and wellbeing, and how to connect living spaces to the natural assets of your site
• The hardscape considerations: stormwater runoff, heat absorption, maintenance and durability
• How to screen or integrate rainwater tanks, clotheslines and BBQ zones into your outdoor room design
• How to handle a tricky north-to-street block (in the southern hemisphere) by locating living and the outdoor room on the front of the home
• The specialist support worth bringing in, including a landscape designer or landscape architect early in the project

Plus a whole lot more.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE NOW.

RESOURCES

Season 2 Episode 11, on outdoor living spaces and swimming pools >>> Outdoor Living Spaces

Episode 211, on roofing design for an outdoor entertaining area or alfresco >>> Outdoor Room Roofing

Episode 425, on including eaves and window hoods in your finished home >>> 44 Ways #25

Sun angle tool app >>> Sunseeker 3D

A free guide to simplifying sustainability across research, planning, design, materials, and building, from Amelia Lee’s 30+ years in residential design and construction >>> 44 Ways to Create a Sustainable Home

Access the support and guidance you need to be confident and empowered when renovating and building your family home inside my signature online program >>> HOME Method