DESIGN
Make the Most of Your Patio All Fall and Winter: An Outdoor Décor Guide
In the Covid-19 era, private outdoor space offers both safety and freedom. Here’s how to extend your yard’s usefulness through the autumn and even into the holidays.
By Kathryn O’Shea-Evans
Aug. 22, 2020 12:01 am ET
IN LATE JUNE, months into the murk of this pandemic, my husband and I hosted relatives in our Denver backyard. As we sat at an antiseptic distance and swore to get together again, the couple posed a worrisome question: How exactly were we going to spend time outside when autumn’s chill descends?
I shivered at the thought. I am the indoorsiest person in Colorado. I don’t do “cold.” I cry when I ski. But the news, for once, is encouraging: It seems that designers and outdoor furniture makers are already on the Covid-era case, scheming how homeowners can squeeze every moment from our outdoor spaces, even once winter settles in.
Some pros suggest charmingly lo-fi adaptations. Atlanta architect Bobby McAlpine advocates a stash of spare lap blankets. “I’m not sure you shouldn’t order a few dozen hoodies and issue them to people,” he said. Grand dame of entertaining Martha Stewart proposed churning out hand-knit scarfs and gloves to give visitors upon arrival, though I’m sure your guests will forgive you for not actually putting yarn to needle yourself. “These can keep them warm and double as PPE items, so it’s a win-win,” she told me.
On the more technical side, design-minded companies have finally improved the look of standing patio heaters, which have historically resembled sci-fi robots. Belgium-based Heatsail offers graceful overhead Dome heaters that nod to Castiglioni’s 1962 Arco floor lamp. Galanter & Jones’s heated seating casts stone into simple, attractive organic shapes. Even in August, when the average low of 55 degrees can feel cooler in the fog off the bay, San Francisco interior designer Kendall Wilkinson is loving her Helios Metreo sofa: “[Our guests] sit down, and unexpectedly they’re like ‘Oh my God, this is amazing,’” she said of the embracing jelly-bean-shaped settee, which plugs into an outlet on the patio of her home near the Sea Cliff neighborhood. “It’s my saving grace for this outside Covid living we’re having to do.”
Los Angeles designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard lays radiant underfloor heating in patio projects, which “really does give you the sense of being heated all over.” For a less-involved solution, Janice Parker, a landscape architect in Greenwich, Conn., unfurls plug-in heat mats made to melt snow and ice on walkways, then hides them under outdoor rugs. To apply the same strategy to your furniture, she suggests heated stadium cushions. “I know they’re not gorgeous, but you can put your slipcovers right back over them,” she said.
The pandemic appears to be boosting demand for warmth on the patio, whether at the end of an electrical cord or a fire poker. Galanter & Jones typically enjoys 20% year-over-year growth in sales; in 2020, it’s seen a spike of 37% over 2019. Searches for “outdoor fireplaces” and “fire pits” on home-goods site Perigold are up 72% year over year. Eight of the nine fire pits that Martha Stewart released through Wayfair this spring—in styles from faux fieldstone to black powder-coated steel—have sold out.
One potential inspiration for families who have reallocated eating-out budgets to outfitting their backyard hangs: the al fresco dining arrangements of high-altitude restaurateurs. At the outdoor tables at French Alpine Bistro in Aspen, Colo., guests sit on chairs draped with fleecy faux sheep pelts. On hand: creamy woolen throws ready to cosset folks enjoying Gruyere fondue by the light of hurricane candles. “We actually seat people there every single night in the winter unless it’s really minus 25,” said the bistro’s Austrian-born owner, Karin Derly. “Historically speaking,” she added, outdoor restaurant dining “goes back to the Spanish flu. They thought about it in 1918 for the very same reasons we think about it now—to extend the space in the streets of Paris.”
On her 750-square-foot roof deck in Brooklyn Heights, designer Laurie Blumenfeld-Russo and her husband enjoy socially distant dinners with friends at their sapele-wood dining table. The couple plans to use the deck through winter, relying on outdoor heaters tucked under their pergola. Though her husband finds them too hot to sit beneath, Ms. Blumenfeld-Russo describes her attitude as full-on “fry me like an egg.”
Approaching cold fronts are inspiring designers to layer outdoor rooms with accessories nearly as cozily as interior ones. On walls behind main seating areas, Mr. Bullard centers “art” with a hidden agenda: Custom infrared-heated wall panels by Art of Heat look like paintings and take up zero real estate. He’ll roll out an outdoor rug for underfoot comfort and toss blankets and performance-fabric velvet pillows on the furniture. It’s all part of a “tactile experience,” he said, that gives the space a more autumnal feel.
n San Francisco, where the average December low is 46 degrees, landscape architect Brian Koch of Terra Ferma Landscapes recently erected a 12-feet-by-20-feet pergola in his own backyard, its galvanized steel frame clad in clear western cedar (shown above, top). The structure is fringed with Pottery Barn outdoor drapes weighted at the hem and hung on a cable system that can draw the curtains in a dash. “When you eliminate wind from any outdoor space it drives up the warmth,” said Mr. Koch. Lining one fence: an Italian sandstone fireplace powered with natural gas. Because it’s ventless, he said, “heat, instead of traveling up a chimney, travels outward toward folks gathering around the fire.”
Mr. Koch also mounted strip LED lighting under the living area’s stone platform. An app lets him dim the lights or change their hue entirely, which creates “a cozy and warm room within a larger yard…especially as evening comes sooner this time of the year.” Ms. Parker noted the need to see each other and move about the yard freely as the days grow shorter. “My favorite option for entertaining is portable LED lanterns. Bring them with you throughout the garden, set them on a table or hang them in the trees.”
Even swapping out exterior bulbs for aesthetically “warmer” versions can make a sitting area more snug, said Heather Trilling, a landscape designer in Los Angeles. She recommends the amber hues of bulbs with a lower Kelvin rating, between 2700K and 3000K. The soft glow, she said, makes it feel “like you are sitting around a campfire roasting marshmallows.”