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Outdoor Experience Design:
design with no limits to live the open door

Today outdoor furniture offers a very varied, wide-range and articulate production that meets a significant and rapid evolution in the way the outdoor, both private and public, is conceived and lived.
What gives the measure of the vitality of the sector and this market’s potential of growth is the European leading trade show “SUN, International Exhibition of Outdoor Products – Design, Furnishing, Accessories”, the authoritative Rimini Fiera annual observatory on this productive sector, that since 1983, the year of its first edition, has increased its exhibitors from 53 to 700 companies of high productive and commercial profile.
During the last years there has been a growing desire to regain a contact with the open spaces, the green, air and sun and upgrade the spaces dedicated to free time, especially in the case of outdoor leisure.
At the same time there has been an increasing attention for the home as the privileged place where to find functionality, comfort and quality, but also as a social space. The house becomes tale and reflex of the self through the choice of furnishing objects with a high connotation and personality, and is able to reflect the aesthetic sensibility of the people living in it and cause emotions.
The demand is more and more competent and the purchasing choices are the result of conscious analyses of the items and information offered by producers; on the other side, the offer continues to propose solutions more and more elaborate and evolved on a technical, technological and aesthetic level.
The world of outdoor is surely ahead in this incessant search for excellence, which turns into continuous evolutions of matter, experimentations in lines and shapes, complex and often brilliant solutions, and products that measure up to much higher consumption scopes.
Outdoor, indoor or “open door”? The new “fluid living”
Instead of outdoor and indoor we should rather speak of “open door”, to testify a space-time continuum between the outside and the inside that involves planning as well as house and food trends in a sort of new philosophy of living, to rediscover the values of life in the open air in contact with nature.
Clear separations between outdoor and interior furniture are progressively decreasing and the ever-growing demand for versatility creeps also in outdoor design, connecting the spaces and widening the functions.
After the exuberance of the ‘80s, the minimalism of the ‘90s and the mixture of genres and styles that has characterised the end of the millennium, what is foreshadowed are houses, but also public venues, meant as “open” and “fluid” spaces, mirrors of their users’ needs and desires.
Grows the interest in a “global” style of living tending to live every space with a projection also outside the domestic walls, through large windows, green areas, terraces and balconies that are meant also for everyday life, sociality, entertainment and relaxation.
By creating a winter garden in the living room and a lounge on the terrace, spaces are reinvented, transform and turn into an uninterrupted environment without partitions where the inside becomes outside and vice versa.
In a continuously growing real-estate market, at least with respect to the prices, the most diffused living solutions are small spaces, two-three-roomed flats in which the terrace, if adequately adjusted, may become an extra room also thanks to the heating technologies for the outdoor and the ever more functional coverings and floorings.

Also within public and hospitality venues the outdoor has become a fundamental place, not only the smokers’ limbo, but a showcase in the open where to see and be seen, a dynamic diaphragm with the city and the neighbourhood, where to live experiences, find atmospheres, build innovative aesthetic identities through colours, materials and particular finishes and a comfortable, efficient furniture.
These real windows on public venues are a visiting card that announces the type and quality of the venue, are extensions of interior spaces that benefit by the new types of lighting and increasingly efficient and economic heating systems, and free the creativity in the choice of shapes, lines and design.

The new Outdoor and the flexible design
Thanks to the design pervading the outdoor, millions of square meters of private green have regained the past splendour, are furnished and lived really like residential environments, spaces dedicated to game and entertainment, areas of socialization and relax.
But the real secret is that the outdoor has become flexible. Flexible because easily interpreted, simple to combine. Flexible because rich in chromatic variants, materials, shapes. Flexible because able to concretely answer the needs, with effective solutions and adequate prices, with formats that don’t impose themselves, but on the contrary follow trends and the customers’ wishes.

Design with no limits
There are no limits to the outdoor sector, which one moment draws inspiration from materials of regional artisan traditions, the next uses polymers and methacrylates, synthetic and natural resins, then rediscovers the taste for different types of wood, metals and differently treated alloys.
With respect to lines and forms no trend prevails. Reference points are functionality, lightness, comfort and design. With these themes runs riot the creativity of architects and producers who are called to satisfy the most eclectic tastes of a market with global dimensions.
The styles range from the most plain classical ones with retro hints that make use of more traditional materials and processing, for example by retrieving particulars made of ceramic, stone and cast iron, to ecological design solutions that meet a growing search for a contact with nature and environmental sustainability and adopt types of wood coming from controlled and certified plantations, treated with vegetable oils and waxes. The styles range from the modern features of plastic experimentation, with pieces of furniture carved in raw materials or created through multi-matter assembling techniques, to the refined elegance of the essential ever-green stave and banister’s lines.
Resin now has charm and is found in many objects ranging from vases to garden accessories and furnishing complements, from gazebo bearing structures to flower boxes and backs, to sofas, tables and chairs, pouffes and armchairs, in combination with superior wood, natural materials and wrought metal. Natural fibres of pulut and cotton combine with water-repellent acrylics and stretch textilene fabrics. Aluminium, steel (stainless, zinc-plated or galvanised) and light alloys incorporate inlaid wooden works of teak, balau, pine and kerouing, hosting cushions and fabrics; intertwined all-natural or synthetic wicker joins glass, wrought iron or batylene elements.

New impulses and specialised planning competences
The outdoor design sector is undergoing an evolution never seen before and the designer is playing a role more and more decisive in the creation of outdoor environments, both private and public, able to give emotions, characterise the ambient and be also functional.
Design’s contribution to this sector is more and more relevant and decisive. The outdoor market involves private and public spaces of any dimension, from terraces to parks, with innumerable possibilities for creative solutions that need updated competences and adequate aesthetic sensibilities to meet buyers’ requests.