Spring Styling – Brightening up an outdoor space for spring.

Hello there! I’m Dawn, from DesigningDawn.com, back again this month with an inspirational moodboard for you! This month has started off a little dreary in my neck of the woods, and all the rain and drizzle has me dreaming of bright colors and sunshine. I’m hoping that April showers will bring May flowers, as they say, but until then, what better way to beat the rainy blues than with a sunny yellow outdoor moodboard?

I rounded up some inspirational porchy spaces to get us all in the right frame of mind.

 

 

 

 

Doesn’t all that eye candy make you want to get outside and decorate a porch? It put me in the perfect frame of mind to create a sunny space of my own. Here’s what I came up with:

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See sources and similar products for this mood board here.

I love warm colors in outdoor spaces. Last year, I put together a patio-themed mood board using bright pinks and oranges. This time, I focused on sunny yellow. I love modern design and I always feel like, especially in outdoor decor, a lot of things I see out there tend toward a more traditional, farmhouse-craft-chic look (is that a thing??). Don’t get me wrong, it can be beautiful and very inviting, but for my mood board, I wanted to mix things up a bit, so I stuck with a more minimal aesthetic.

To get the modern outdoor look I was after, I followed a few basic rules:

• Clean Lines and Shapes: To keep the space feeling modern, I carefully chose items that have really clean and simplified silhouettes. Viewed separately, some of them may not scream ‘modern design’ but the overall aesthetic is absent of ornate curves, rustic distressing, or frilly accents that can detract from a modern decor scheme, and that’s why it works. I worked in a few very modern pieces (like the planters and the chairs) with a few more traditional or vintage feeling pieces (like the bird sign and the planter stand) to create a space that feels modern, but not cold.

• Simplified Patterns: Maybe the most important thing to keep in mind if you’re aiming for a simplistic modern design style, is to avoid wild patterns. While I love pattern, and it definitely can work in a modern space if used in moderation, the types of patterns that lend themselves best to this style of design are geometric (as in the rugs) rather than organic. While I did throw in one patterned pillow to keep things from feeling too rigid, floral patterns or patterns with too much movement can quickly transform a space from feeling clean and modern to feeling a bit more eclectic and collected.

• Brights and Neutrals: For this space, I chose one really bright color to tie everything together and give it a wow-factor, but worked to keep everything else pretty neutral. Blacks, grays, whites, and natural brown tones provide a perfect base for the yellow to pop off of, and keep the look clean and minimal.

• Depth through Texture: Despite not having a lot of frill, this space actually has quite a bit going on in terms of texture. Mixing materials like wood, metal, fabric, plastic, cement, ceramic, and fiber rugs, not to mention adding in greenery, creates a really rich feeling space with a ton of textural elements.

Overall, I’m really happy with how this moodboard shaped up. I kind of want to use it to style my own outdoor spaces this spring, and despite the rain outside my window at the moment, I think the mood has gotten much sunnier in here!

Happy Spring, friends! As always, thank you to the Remodelaholic team for having me back each month. If you like what you see, be sure to visit me over on my blog, DesigningDawn, or follow along on social media. See you again next month!

-Dawn

See more from Dawn:

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More spring styling ideas:

Spring mantels + free printable

Spring decorating with nature

Modern spring color schemes

Published: April 24, 2015Filed Under: Contributor, Design Inspiration, Mood Boards, Spring Tagged: Decks, Modern, Mood boards, Outdoor living, outdoor spaces, Patios, Yellow

About Dawn Sailors

Dawn is one half of the team behind the creative blog, AD Aesthetic. By day she works as the VP of Creative for a design and marketing company (getting paid to make things look good!), while by night she renovates her Midwest home, refinishes thrift-store furniture for fun, and works with her husband on raising two tiny humans. Dawn believes in the potential to design your surroundings and your life one day at a time, and lives by the motto, 'Make everything beautiful.' Get to know her better by visiting her blog, ADaesthetic.com, or following along on Facebook and Instagram.