Outdoor Living

Outdoor Living Space Design — A Room Without Walls, Built for Every Season

The best outdoor spaces don't get put away in October. They get used all year round.

There’s a version of outdoor living that’s a lounge chair and a portable grill dragged out when the weather cooperates. And then there’s a version that’s a genuine room — covered, equipped, comfortable, and designed to be used from the first warm day of spring through the last fire of fall. Maybe even through the winter, if it’s designed right.

That second version is what we design.

At Candid Home Design, we approach outdoor living spaces the same way we approach every room in a home: with intention, with attention to how the space will actually be used, and with design that makes the space feel complete — not assembled from a catalog, not improvised around whatever the contractor had on hand, but genuinely designed for the family that lives there and the life they want to live outside.

Whether your outdoor living project arrives alongside a deck or patio, as part of a broader remodel, or entirely on its own, the approach is the same: design it as a room first, and let the features serve that room.

What Separates an Outdoor Living Space From an Outdoor Area

A patio is a surface. An outdoor living space is a destination.

The difference is design. A well-designed outdoor living space has a defined overhead plane — a covered structure that creates shelter and makes the space feel enclosed without closing it off. It has zones: a place to cook, a place to gather around a fire, a place to sit and eat, a place to settle in for the evening. It’s oriented thoughtfully relative to the sun, the wind, the view, and the way people move between inside and outside. It has features that extend its usability across seasons — shade for summer, warmth for fall and winter — so it earns its place in your home’s square footage twelve months a year.

Getting all of that right requires more than selecting features from a brochure. It requires design — thinking through how the space is laid out, how the elements relate to each other and to the house, and how the whole composition comes together into something that feels intentional rather than accumulated.

Outdoor Living Spaces We Design

Covered Outdoor Rooms and Shade Structures

Coverage is the single most important feature in a year-round outdoor living space. Without it, your outdoor room is weather-dependent. With it, the space becomes usable in the rain, shaded on the hottest summer afternoons, and sheltered enough in cooler months to extend the season significantly with a heater or a fire feature.

We design covered outdoor structures that are architecturally integrated with your home — not add-ons that fight the roofline, but extensions that feel like the house always reached this far. Attached pergolas, full roof extensions, shed-roof covers, and hybrid structures that combine open and covered zones all fall within our scope. The structure is designed to be permitted, built correctly, and tied into your home’s framing safely — not just aesthetically pleasing on a rendering.

Coverage also creates the overhead plane that makes a space feel like a room. Once you have it, everything else — lighting, fans, heaters, the furniture arrangement beneath it — begins to make sense in a way it simply doesn’t on an open platform.

Outdoor Kitchens

An outdoor kitchen transforms how you use your outdoor space and how you entertain. Instead of shuttling food and supplies in and out through the back door all evening, everything you need is outside — grill, prep space, refrigeration, storage, maybe a sink. The cook stays in the party. The party moves outside.

We design outdoor kitchens as integrated elements of the larger outdoor living space — positioned relative to the dining area, the covered structure, and the home’s interior kitchen so that the flow between all three makes sense. We design the built-in elements and the structure that houses them; your contractor and trades handle the mechanical connections. The result is an outdoor kitchen that looks like it was always there and works exactly the way you need it to.

Fire Pits and Outdoor Fireplaces

Nothing extends the outdoor season like fire. A well-placed fire feature turns a cool October evening into a reason to stay outside, transforms a backyard gathering into something memorable, and gives your outdoor living space a focal point that no other element quite replicates.

We design fire pits and outdoor fireplaces as deliberate parts of the space — positioned for safety, sized for the scale of the area, and located where they anchor the seating arrangement naturally rather than sitting awkwardly in a corner. A fire feature that’s designed into the space from the beginning reads as intentional. One that’s added after the fact almost always looks like an afterthought.

We design for both gas and wood-burning configurations and work with your contractor and local requirements to ensure the installation is safe and code-compliant.

Lounge and Dining Areas

The layout of your outdoor living space determines how it gets used — and how much it gets used. A space that’s just one big open area with furniture scattered across it never quite settles. A space with defined zones — a dining area that’s clearly for eating, a lounge area that’s clearly for settling in, a transition zone near the fire — functions the way a well-designed interior room functions: intuitively, comfortably, and in a way that invites people to stay.

We design outdoor living layouts with zone planning at the center. How many people does this family regularly entertain? Where does the sun hit in the late afternoon? How does traffic flow from the kitchen door to the dining table to the fire? What’s the sightline from the lounge area — into the yard, toward the fire, back toward the house? These are interior design questions applied to an exterior space, and they’re exactly the questions that separate a designed outdoor room from a furnished outdoor area.

Designing for Year-Round Use — Not Just the Good Months

Middle Tennessee gives you a lot of outdoor living days. The shoulder seasons — spring and fall — are genuinely beautiful. But summer gets hot, and winter gets cold enough that an unprotected outdoor space goes unused for months at a time.

Year-round outdoor living is a design problem, and it has design solutions. Coverage for shade and rain shelter. Ceiling fans under the covered structure to move air on hot evenings. A fire feature or outdoor heater to extend fall and winter use. Strategic orientation that takes advantage of morning or evening shade depending on how the space gets used most. These aren’t luxury add-ons — they’re the features that determine whether your outdoor living space gets used 365 days a year or 90.

We design with year-round use as the baseline assumption, not the stretch goal. The features that extend your season are planned into the space from the beginning, not retrofitted awkwardly after the fact.

Standalone Projects and Bundled Design — We Handle Both

Some of our outdoor living projects arrive as part of a larger scope — a remodel that’s adding square footage inside and a covered outdoor room outside, or a new deck that’s designed from the start to include a kitchen and fire feature. In those cases, we have the advantage of planning everything together, and the indoor-outdoor connection can be resolved at the design level before construction begins.

Other projects come to us as standalone outdoor living commissions — homeowners who already have a deck or patio and want to transform it into something more. We’re equally comfortable in both situations. The design process is the same: understand how the space is used, understand what’s missing, and design an outdoor room that fills those gaps completely.

If you’re not sure whether your outdoor project warrants a designer, consider this: the features that make outdoor living spaces genuinely great — integrated coverage, built-in kitchen structures, fire features anchored correctly in the layout — are exactly the features that benefit most from being designed before they’re built. A fire pit in the wrong place is a fire pit you work around forever. A kitchen counter at the wrong height is a kitchen counter you regret every time you use it. Getting the design right costs far less than fixing it later.

Why Homeowners Choose Candid Home Design for Outdoor Living

Outdoor living designed as a room — with zones, flow, and intentional layout — not just a list of features dropped into a space
Coverage and shade structures designed to be structurally sound, permitted correctly, and architecturally integrated with your home
Experience designing outdoor spaces as part of broader remodels and additions — inside and outside planned together from the start
Year-round usability built into every design — shade, shelter, warmth, and orientation all considered from the beginning
Close to 300 completed projects — we bring the same design rigor to outdoor spaces that we bring to every room inside the home
Family-owned and operated, remote-ready — serving Greater Nashville and homeowners throughout the Southeast and beyond

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a permit for a covered outdoor structure in Tennessee?

In most Tennessee jurisdictions, any permanent covered structure attached to your home — a pergola with a solid roof, a covered porch addition, a full roof extension — requires a building permit. Some open pergola structures may be exempt depending on your county, but rules vary. We design to meet local permitting requirements and produce the drawings your building department needs for approval.

What is the difference between a pergola and a covered patio?

A pergola is an open overhead structure — typically with rafters or lattice that provides partial shade but doesn’t shed rain. A covered patio or outdoor room has a solid or semi-solid roof that provides true weather protection. Both have their place depending on your climate goals and design preferences; we’ll help you think through which is right for your space and how you want to use it.

How do I know if my outdoor living space needs a building designer?

If your project involves a permanent covered structure attached to your home, an outdoor kitchen with built-in elements, or any work that requires a building permit, proper design drawings protect you — ensuring the project is built safely, correctly, and approved by your local building department. We also frequently identify site and layout issues during the design phase that would have caused problems or regrets after construction.

Can an outdoor kitchen be added to an existing deck or patio?

Yes — and this is one of the most common requests we receive. An existing deck or patio can often accommodate a built-in outdoor kitchen, though the design needs to account for the existing structure’s load capacity, the location of utility connections, and the layout of the surrounding space. We assess all of that as part of the design process.

Can you design an outdoor living space if I'm outside of Nashville?

Yes. Our design process is remote-first and we work with homeowners throughout the Southeast and beyond. If your project is a good fit, location isn’t a limitation.

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Serving Greater Nashville — Brentwood, Franklin, Gallatin, Lebanon, Murfreesboro, and surrounding Middle Tennessee — plus remote home addition design throughout the Southeast and beyond.