A New Season Awaits
Summer is the season when we step outside and life slows down.
Summer is the one season that gives us permission to slow down, and the place where it happens is rarely in a room in our home—it is the back deck, the patio, and the front porch where a morning coffee kicks in before the day heats up, and where the stars create a show for the families who stayed to watch the light fade from the sky. We spend time in these spaces, yet most homeowners treat their outdoor space as an afterthought: a collection of bricks or stone, a railing around a wooden deck, a chair or two dragged out and put away. We pour our attention into the kitchen and the family room, and then, when summer arrives, it quietly invites us to live somewhere we never bothered to design.
I think about this every year on my own deck. I live in a row house on Capitol Hill, the kind with a small back yard and a deck that stands proud above the yard below. In the winter, I don’t really see my neighbors. Sure, we wave through the front window, maybe, when we pass each other on the sidewalk while our dogs’ tails wag with excitement. When the first truly nice evening comes, we are all outside at once: my family on the deck, the couple behind us grilling dinner, the kids laughing and screaming with delight to have an extra place to play (and make a mess). We lean over railing and pick right back up where we left off in October. We smile, we wave, we call across the gardens eager to forget the winter we just survived and marvel at the neighbor whose yard is already filled with everything green. Nothing was scheduled. The weather simply turned, and the back deck did what the living room never could — it put us all back in view of one another.
That, to me, is the quiet argument for designing these spaces with real care. Our outside spaces are doing double work when they slow us down and reconnect us. A porch is not just a place to sit; it is the one part of the home that faces outward, that keeps you on speaking terms with the street, the season, and the people who happen to live near you. A deck is where a family remembers the the neighborhood is family, too.
About the Design
I design outdoor spaces like rooms because they are rooms. A morning porch needs a real chair set exactly where the early sun lands and a surface beside it at the right height for a cup — not a plastic thing you'd never choose for indoors. An evening deck needs shade for the hot part of the day and warm low light for after, so that when the sun drops, no one has any reason to go inside. And it helps, more than people expect, to orient the whole thing toward the yard and the fence line rather than away from it — to build in the possibility of being seen, and of seeing.
The most luxurious thing a home can offer in summer is not more square footage. It is a reason to step outside in the morning and stay there, and a reason to linger after dinner until the neighbors drift out, too. We are very good at designing the rooms where we get things done. The work summer keeps asking me to do is the best kind — designing spaces that encourage us to slow down and find our way back to the people just beyond the fence.