Indoor style, outdoors – 2012 garden design

Tired of your garden? Do you yearn for an outside kitchen, complete with fridge, oven and sinks? Or perhaps an outdoor shower? Do you think your garden is crying out for luminous, glow-in-the-dark furniture? Or a chandelier as the centrepiece?

Sound crazy? Not at all! You’ll be pleased to know that all of this is coming to a highstreet near you in the next few years. The trade shows are buzzing with excitement at the incredible new products and materials coming on to the market. Admittedly, these items are currently right at the top end of the price scales but, as is the way with such things, they are likely to inspire a whole slew of products that will be on the high street before long.

You needn’t take my word for it, just take the case of outdoor sofas. About five years ago these same shows started to sell outdoor sofas to great fanfare. Now they’re for sale in department stores and DIY shops. Just like in clothes fashion - what happens in haute couture will be in the high street in just a few years. So what do you have to look forward to? Put simply, the key  trend is to make the outside as comfortable and stylish as any room inside the house, and doing this by taking pretty much everything you can find on the inside and making an outdoor version of it.

I’ll start with the floor. For several years there’s been a burgeoning market in fake grass. One company in London set up in the depths of the credit crunch and a year later they had a turnover of over a million pounds: there’s a demand out there.

But the people who make the fake grass have started to make it in different colours (stay with me, it gets better) and bingo! They are now selling outside carpets with bold shapes and patterns - looking very much like the carpets you would have inside you house.

And comfort? What started with outdoor sofas has now gone to some extremes. We have bean bags, day beds, circular sofas, four poster beds... all for the great outdoors.

Behind this are technical innovations which have made it possible to have water resistant but beautiful material on the sofas and cushions to give you all the comfort you’d expect from a sofa inside your house - but outside. The very latest; outdoor velvet.

And to go with the sofas and beds you need standard lights, table lights, sculptural lights, wall lights. Pretty much any light you would have inside is now available for outside use.

But, because it’s a garden they can go one step further and have much more fun with lights. What about giant, coloured, solar powered flower lights? Projections are coming into their own: lights, pictures, photographs, TV images projected onto walls of the garden. Interactive lighting displays where you can ‘move’ pieces around a chess board or the children can kick a virtual ball. And all of these remotely controlled, at the touch of an ipod.

A trend that’s been growing for a few years now is for outdoor fireplaces and fire tables, but artists are now taking this idea and making metal sculptures which visually interact with the fire. Outdoor art for the walls, colourful screens to cordon off areas of the garden or provide privacy, outside gyms, pocket showers, hidden swimming pools.

The sheer inventiveness, fun and excitement of these new products is something I’ve never experienced before. Technology, design and art are all working together to create some amazing things. So what are you going to create?

Caroline Tilston is a tutor at MyGardenSchool, where she teaches courses in Decorating Your Room Outside and Garden Design for Interior Designers. She is also a bestselling author of garden design books and prolific gardening journalist. Her company, Oak Studio Design Ltd, has been providing clients with beautiful gardens for the past 10 years.

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Indoor style, outdoors - 2012 garden design