Six spaces that make you want to close your laptop and go outside.
There’s a particular kind of outdoor space that doesn’t ask anything of you. No project list, no maintenance reminder, no sense that it’s half-finished. It just pulls you in and makes you want to stay.
We’ve been watching a lot of that kind of space lately. Here are six that have stuck with us — each one from a show on SHG Living, each one a different answer to the same question: what does a summer well spent actually look like?
1. The backyard that became a room
Brent Gentling has spent four seasons on Backyard Builds proving that the most useful outdoor spaces aren’t the most complicated ones. What makes his projects stick isn’t the scale — it’s the thinking behind them. A built-in bench that doubles as storage. A pergola positioned to catch the afternoon shade exactly right. An outdoor kitchen that means you actually stay outside instead of running back in.
The spaces that end up feeling most lived-in are the ones designed around how people actually spend time, not how they imagine they might.
Watch Backyard Builds on SHG Living →
2. The garden that feeds you
GreenDreams: Food Forests takes a different view of what a backyard can be — not just a place to relax, but a place that produces something. Food forests layer edible plants the way nature does, with canopy trees, shrubs, ground cover, and root vegetables working together. The result is a landscape that looks lush and considered, and quietly feeds you all summer.
There’s something about walking out to pick dinner that changes your relationship to your outdoor space entirely.
Watch GreenDreams: Food Forests on SHG Living →
3. The landscape designed to slow you down
The best work on GreenDreams EcoLandscapes isn’t dramatic. It’s the pathway that makes you take the long way around. The water feature you can hear before you see it. The planting that brings in birds at a reliable hour each morning. These are landscapes built around experience, not appearance — and they’re the ones that make you want to be outside every day, not just when everything looks perfect.
Watch GreenDreams EcoLandscapes on SHG Living →
4. The minimal deck that’s somehow everything
Simple Dwelling has a recurring argument that less space, used intentionally, feels more generous than more space used carelessly. That argument holds outdoors too. Some of the most compelling outdoor spaces in seven seasons of the show are the small ones — a rooftop deck with two chairs and a view, a narrow courtyard with a single tree and nowhere to put anything except yourself.
Restraint, it turns out, is a design strategy.
Watch Simple Dwelling on SHG Living →
5. The hotel outdoor space you want to bring home
Hotels ByDesign spends a lot of time in places most of us will never stay — which makes it surprisingly useful for the spaces we actually own. The outdoor areas in the hotels featured in the series are where most of the real design thinking happens. Shade that works. Furniture that weathers beautifully. Landscaping that responds to its climate rather than fighting it. These aren’t ideas reserved for resort budgets. They translate.
Watch Hotels ByDesign on SHG Living →
6. The space built with what the land already had
America ByDesign keeps returning to a particular kind of project — the one that starts by asking what’s already there. Architects who orient a home around an existing tree. Landscape designers who work with the natural grade instead of flattening it. Public spaces that feel inevitable because they were shaped by their site.
The outdoor spaces that hold up best over years are almost always the ones that felt like they belonged from the beginning.
Watch America ByDesign on SHG Living — new episodes every Friday →
Every show featured in this article is streaming now on SHG Living. Watch on the app for Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, and mobile — or stream on the web at watch.shgliving.com.
