The COVID-19 pandemic has restricted most of our means of leisure, entertainment, and relaxation! Visiting our favorite restaurant, or jetting off on a little getaway are not always practical choices anymore, we need to think through our plans, take the utmost precautions, and be conscious and careful at all times. So, instead of turning outwards, why don’t we turn inwards? A great option could be using our humble backyards as recreation spaces! How about turning your backyard into an outdoor movie theatre for your family and friends, or hosting a barbecue party with the best grill in the market? We’ve curated a collection of product designs to help you transform these exciting ideas into a reality! These products will turn your yard into the ultimate fun space. We bet you won’t want to step out of your yard, once you introduce these products to it!
The Rocco multifunctional outdoor furniture by Moróro is a barbecue, a sofa, a champagne bar, and more! 2020 has been about creating intimate moments at home, and nothing says intimate like a cozy evening in your backyard! To take things up a notch, we have Rocco which is an all-rounder piece of outdoor furniture. Its clever design transforms it from a fun barbecue into a sofa or champagne bar and even a smores pit – I think it’s safe to say Rocco is an essential this year! You can add a fire bowl to the base or choose from various other accessories like a grill, tabletop, ice bucket, and parasol base. Customize Rocco to fit what you define as a chill evening.
Cineorama by Erika Hock is an outdoor viewing space, so you can sit and watch a couple of your favorite movies with your family and friends, within the comforts of your own backyard! It’s the perfect movie-watching solution during this pandemic when you wish to avoid the crowded movie theatres but also yearn for the conventional theatre experience. You can simply convert your backyard into one!
A tool used for firing clay in a kiln transforms into a minimalist bird feeder! This ceramic bird feeder doesn’t present a new solution for bird feeders but does present an approach for sustainable product manufacturing that solves a problem faced by many designers: the scrap material used during construction, like rings in clay kilns, that is discarded once the product is finished. Ceramika Design and Studio Kononenko wanted to make use of ceramic rings used when firing clay in kilns. The main element of the bird feeder is formed from ceramic – the frame and body of the bird feeder. Covering just about a quarter of the round frame is a plastic plate that functions to store plenty of food for the wild birds. Extending from the middle of the plastic plate is a wooden peg that works as a perch for birds to enjoy their seeds. It’s a beautiful sustainable design for your backyard!
The company behind this work shed has been acing the game when it comes to well-designed office furniture like flexible desks and ergonomic chairs. The Zen Work Pod was a culmination of their furniture design mission clubbed with the need of the hour. The minimalist backyard structure is a stark contrast to the existing toolsheds, it is a modern workspace equipped with all essentials needed for a ‘zen’ workday. “It provides a fresh solution that completely redefines the home office, providing maximum focus during every working hour,” says the team who especially kept creators and freelancers in mind while designing it. The pod features floor-to-ceiling windows and an angular roof all wrapped in a sturdy oak, walnut, and aluminum structure. It is compact but the minimal build and sweeping windows make it feel spacious.
The BURCH BARREL gives you unprecedented control over your barbecue process. You can operate the barbecue lid without having to touch it, or rest the grill on any uneven surface without worrying about it falling over, you can even lift the grill plate off the coal-pan to add more fuel. Moreover, when you’re not grilling food, the BURCH BARREL doubles up as a portable fireplace for those perfect sunset social gatherings. The barrel’s design is immediately striking, with a large tripod system that has the barrel suspended from the very center. This unique format keeps the barrel balanced and vertical at all times, allowing you to mount it on rocky terrain or even on slanted surfaces without any fear of the barrel tipping over. Inspired by a camera’s tripod, the BURCH BARREL comes with telescopic legs that let you orient the unit to be stable, no matter how unstable your ground is, giving it a competitive advantage over regular barbecue grills that traditionally require a flat surface like a pavement, to begin with.
The Bigfoot Table comes handcrafted out of Western Red Cedar wood with a built-in lightweight stainless steel endoskeleton to provide it with its strength. Right in the center of the table lies an opening that reveals a rectangular fireplace built right into the tabletop. The fireplace is supplied with fuel using a propane canister that can be placed in the hollow-space below and comes with a metal outer-casing to protect the wood from getting burnt. Scattered within the fireplace pit are faux-stones that help create a truly remarkable burning surface that’s perfect for roasting smores on, and the fire can be ignited electrically with a simple push of a button and even regulated with the turn of a knob. The fireplace cover is even designed to be reversed, with a game of Mancala integrated into its flip-side – with the ability to use the firestones as game pieces!
The lounger, recliner, and couch have come of age – it’s the era to usher in better ways to sit… and feel like royalty. Thanks to the ‘Hammock Throne’, you can literally feel like that. One of the biggest problems with hammocks is that you need two trees (or poles) to hold them up, and typically they are placed outdoors. Even the home-swing doesn’t match up to the comfort of lazing in the comfortable embrace of a hammock. Folks at Yellow Leaf are solving for this, by giving us the Hammock Throne. Kind of an indoor/outdoor hammock chair; this full-body contraption features a 360° swivel thanks to the anchor base. Simply sit back, relax and swivel all around on a whim. I’d put this free-standing hammock in my living room, where will you?
This device does for your smart home what your Alexa can’t. Tempest turns every part of your home into a smart home, from your front-gate to your backyard. Designed as an all-in-one weather-monitoring system that sits on your lawn, Tempest uses a variety of sensors and AI to predict the weather for your house. It enables you to plan your day better, know what to watch out for when you’re stepping out or even when you’re indoors, and most importantly, it helps calibrate your home’s energy consumption based on the forecast it generates. It’ll tell you when there’s a storm brewing minutes before the storm hits or if you should put on sunscreen when the sunlight’s harsh, it can close your garage door when it gets too windy, and it’ll automatically switch your sprinklers off if there’s a rain shower in the forecast. The Tempest runs entirely on solar power and communicates with your home using long-range Wi-Fi. It even sends back data to WeatherFlow, which collectively uses all the pooled information to accurately predict weather patterns across the world.
A portable smart fireplace is what we need for this unprecedented holiday season! My Warmth by Simon Pavy is a conceptual fireplace that was created to make having a fireplace accessible despite how your interior is laid out. The smart portable appliance also gives you the same cozy vibes while reducing work that comes with a traditional fireplace. My Warmth is the size of a humidifier or an air purifier so it doesn’t take a lot of space in your living room. There is a dial to control the temperature so you can pick the right degree for toasty toes or crank it up for smores! The all brushed aluminum gives it a sleek aesthetic that reminds me of glass domes that cover baked goods – as one should have by the fireplace. My Warmth lets you enjoy the quintessential holiday vibes with your own portable fireplace. I can already hear Nat King Cole start on those chestnuts!
Eve Aqua is a smart water controller that will continue to regularly and quantitatively irrigate your plants, lawn, flowerbed, or backyard. It is compatible with your smart devices as well as Siri so you can set up the home kit and control the system with your phone, tablet, etc. It has 7 watering periods in a day and you can set it up as per your needs and even create an autonomous schedule. These irrigation plans are stored in Eve Aqua so even if your device is disconnected, it will still do the job. It also has a two-channel water distributor so you can use it for irrigation without tying up your faucet. The auto shut-off feature makes sure you never have to watch the clock or come home to a flooded garden. It conserves a lot more water through its smart management system when compared to us doing it manually.
For more such exciting outdoor designs, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this post!
