The best outdoor living and entertaining ideas for New Zealand homes
It is a Friday in February and nobody has gone inside since five o’clock. The table is long enough that people have spread out along it, one end still eating, the other end has given up and turned their chairs to face the last of the light. Somebody has kicked their shoes off. The hedge behind you is taking the sting out of the wind you can hear moving through the trees further down the section, but not feeling. There are lamps on in the house and nobody wants to be in there.
Ten o’clock. Still warm, because the paving has been holding heat all afternoon and the fire has been going since eight. Somebody puts another bottle on the table and the conversation resets for another hour.
Ten o’clock on a Friday, and nobody wants to move. That is the thing you are buying, and three decisions about where the space sits will settle it before you choose a single material.
Quick answer: The outdoor spaces that get used share three things: a north-facing aspect, real shelter from the prevailing wind, and a position within about a dozen steps of the kitchen. Get those right and a simple paved terrace will beat an expensive one in the wrong spot. Budget roughly 11 square metres for a dining setting of six, and expect $250 to $900 per square metre for the surface it sits on.
But that Friday evening doesn’t come without your input long before anything gets built, so here are the ideas that consistently earn their place, and the ones people regret paying for.
What separates an outdoor room that gets used from one that doesn’t?
Three things, and none of them costs money at the design stage.
Which way it faces. Down here the sun sits in the north. A terrace off the south side of the house is in shadow for most of a winter day and gets sun only in the late evening in high summer. This decides more about whether a space gets used than every other decision combined, and it is free to get right on paper and enormously expensive to fix in concrete.
Whether the wind can find you. A meal outdoors is ruined by a fifteen-knot breeze long before it is ruined by temperature. The counter-intuitive part is that a solid wall is a poor windbreak. Air piles over the top of it and drops into a turbulent, gusty pocket on the sheltered side, which is exactly where you have put the table. A barrier that lets some air through, roughly 40 to 60 per cent open, filters the wind instead of blocking it, and the calm it creates extends downwind for around ten times its own height. So a 2m hedge or slatted screen buys you useful shelter for about 20m. That is a number you can lay a terrace out around.
How far it is from the kitchen. Watch where people actually eat and it is nearly always the flat surface closest to the fridge. A beautiful pavilion at the bottom of the garden gets used four times a summer. Something plainer, twelve steps from where the food is, gets used four times a week.
1. A dining terrace sized for the table you actually want
Start with the table and work outwards, because almost every disappointing terrace is a terrace that was drawn to fit the space left over.
A dining table for six is roughly 1.8 to 2.1m long and 0.9 to 1m wide. Allow about 600mm of table edge per person so nobody is eating with their elbows pinned. Then add 900mm of clear space on every side people will sit on, so chairs can push back and somebody can walk behind them with a plate in each hand.
That puts a six-seat setting at about 3m by 3.8m of usable surface, or a shade over 11 square metres, before you have added a single planter or barbecue. A round table for six wants a square of about 3.6m.
Under it, in New Zealand, expect $250 to $400 per square metre for treated pine decking professionally installed, $450 to $650 for kwila, and $500 to $750 for composite. A deck raised more than 1.5m above the ground adds another $300 to $700 per square metre once piles, bracing and engineering come into it.
2. A roof over part of it, not all of it
The single change that turns a three-month space into a nine-month one.
Cover a portion of the terrace and you get somewhere to sit through a shower, somewhere to eat without the midday sun on the back of your neck, and somewhere the furniture can stay out. Cover the whole thing and you have built a dark room with no walls that nobody sits in on a fine day.
The proportion I would aim for is roughly a third to a half covered. Enough to shelter the table, with open paving beside it that people drift onto when the sun comes out.
A basic timber pergola costs $4,000 to $10,000 supplied and installed. A professionally built timber one at a proper entertaining size sits at $10,000 to $22,000. A motorised louvred roof, where the slats tilt open and closed like a blind, starts around $20,000 for a modest mid-range system and reaches $45,000 and beyond on a large premium install. Fully installed, the whole category works out at roughly $900 to $2,200 a square metre.
3. Fire, because it buys you the evening
Of everything on this list, fire has the best ratio of cost to hours gained.
A fire keeps people outside after the temperature has stopped justifying it. Two to three extra hours on a summer evening, and three or four weekends recovered at each end of the season. Nothing else on the list buys that many hours for the money.
The choice is between a built-in outdoor fireplace, which is architecture and priced like it, and a good fire pit with seating designed around it, which is a fraction of the cost and gets used more because it takes two minutes to light. Set the seating at around 1.5 to 2m back from the flame so people are not squinting, and put it slightly off the main path so nobody has to walk past the heat carrying food.
4. An outdoor kitchen, honestly costed
This is the item that most often gets designed in and least often gets used to its full extent.
A basic outdoor cooking area, a bench and a grill on existing paving, comes in at a few thousand dollars. A self-contained kitchen pod, delivered as one unit with barbecue, rangehood, sink and fridge, costs $27,000 to $40,000 including GST and installation. A custom built-in with utilities, stone benchtops and full appliances goes past $50,000. Running gas and water out to it, and the weatherproof outdoor circuits, sit on top of every one of those figures.
What most people use, most of the time, is a barbecue, a solid bench beside it, a tap, a bin, and a power point. That combination costs a small fraction of a built-in kitchen and covers ninety per cent of the actual cooking.
So the honest steer: if you cook outdoors seriously and often, build the kitchen and enjoy it. If you barbecue on summer weekends, spend the difference on the roof and the fire and you will use the garden more.
5. A second place to sit, away from the house
Every good garden has two outdoor rooms, and the smaller one is often the better one.
The main terrace is for other people. The second spot is for you: a bench where the morning sun lands first, a pair of chairs at the far end of the lawn facing back at the house, a seat tucked into a corner that catches the last of the evening. It costs almost nothing, and it gives you a reason to walk into the garden rather than just look at it.
It also gives the main terrace something to look at, and a garden with a destination in it feels twice the size of one without.
6. Lighting, which does more than the budget suggests
Light is what stops the garden turning into a black window at eight o’clock.
Three layers cover it. Low light along the paths and steps so people can move safely. A warm pool of light over the table, low enough to sit under. And two or three uplights into the best trees or the texture of a wall, which is what makes the garden look like it continues past the paving instead of stopping at the edge of the deck.
Keep it warm, keep it dim, and aim it away from where people’s eyes will be. A garden lit like a car park at night undoes a lot of daytime design.
7. Planting as the walls of the room
The reason a photographed outdoor space looks calm is almost always that it is enclosed by green rather than by fence.
Hedging and massed planting give you privacy without the boxed-in feeling of a solid boundary, they filter wind the way a solid barrier cannot, and they soften every hard line the builder left behind. Repeat a small number of plants in generous quantities rather than collecting one of everything. Scent goes closest to where people sit. Anything that drops fruit, sap or heavy leaf litter goes anywhere except over the table.
This is the layer people cut when the budget tightens, and it is the one that does most for how the finished space feels.
What would I cut first?
In this order, if the number has to come down.
Cut the built-in outdoor kitchen back to a barbecue, bench and tap. Cut the water feature entirely. Reduce the terrace area rather than downgrading the material, because a smaller space in good stone reads better than a large one in cheap pavers. Simplify the roof from motorised louvres to a fixed structure. Phase the planting over two seasons.
What I would not cut: the aspect, the shelter, the position relative to the kitchen, and the lighting. Those four are what decide whether anybody sits out there, and three of them cost nothing but thought at the drawing stage.
Common questions
How big should an outdoor living area be?
Work backwards from the furniture. A six-seat dining setting needs about 11 square metres of clear surface, a lounge grouping of a sofa and two chairs around 9 to 12 square metres. Add circulation space around both. Most people overestimate how big the space needs to look and underestimate how much clear floor the chairs need.
Should the outdoor area be the same level as the house?
Where the site allows it, yes. A single continuous level from the living room floor out to the terrace makes the inside feel larger and takes away the small mental hurdle of a step. Where the ground falls away, one generous wide step reads far better than three narrow ones.
Do I need council consent for a deck or pergola?
It depends on the height, the size and where it sits on the site, and the rules differ by district. Check before you design rather than after, because a consent requirement discovered late can change the whole layout. This is something we can assist with in a landscape design.
What is the biggest mistake people make with outdoor living?
Building it where the leftover space was, rather than where the sun and shelter are. The second biggest is building one large area instead of two smaller ones.
Can you see it before it is built?
That is what a 3D render is for. Sun angles, the shadow the roof throws at four in the afternoon, the height of the hedge against the fence, the width of the terrace with the table on it. Far easier to move a wall on screen than after it is poured.
Work out where on your property people will want to stay after dark. Every other decision on this list follows from that one, and it is the only one that costs nothing to get right.