The Site
A client has a small trapezoid-shaped balcony that he wants to beautify with containers for little cost. Specifically he wants to beautify it before his wife returns from visiting family, as a surprise! What’s more, he wasn’t exactly sure what she would like or not like.
The balcony occupies the whole side of the apartment, open to the full height glass walls of the living room and dining room. The sliding glass door is left of centre, leaving more room to the right and less room to the left.
The Designs
Here’s a very simple design for this small space.
Room for a bistro table (24″ square) and three chairs (altho’ bistro sets only ever come with two!), and several large containers that would give a feeling of enclosure without overwhelming the space.
Here’s the second suggestion I made to the client:
Instead of eating on the balcony, I’ve suggested a nice comfy love seat filling the front-to-back dimension. In this case there’s more sense of being in an intimate setting, with the railing to the outside providing one wall, the big dining room window the opposite wall, a tall shrub/tree container behind, and looking east (from this 7th floor site) and toward the other containers.
This is where it got a bit tricky: the client liked both suggestions but didn’t know which one his wife would prefer. In the end we chose the second for a simple reason: there was already a table on the balcony that had never been assembled. Clearly, eating on the balcony hasn’t been a priority for them.
Designing is as much a matter of identifying what fits your lifestyle as it is coming up with clever ways to fill a space.
The Containers
Now, since I’ve totally teased you by calling this post “5 Great Containers” and not showing any containers, I’ll give you a preview of the next posts:
As always, look forward to your comments, questions, suggestions. Click on Follow to get details of the 5 Great Containers–you won’t want to miss these!
Real Life Garden Solutions 