Happy Memories

Don’t ignore your own positive prior garden or yard experiences.  If your childhood garden featured brightly coloured furniture you loved, use the same style again in your current garden if you can, regardless of whether it’s in fashion or not.

If your family has always created tiny backyard bird havens with water features, and you like birds, build in a bird sanctuary.

Conjuring Upbeat Memories

Design elements that send you upbeat “silent signals,” for example, via memories they call to mind or anything else, are things that you should pull into your current outdoor spaces.

The nonverbal messages these items communicate are likely to have a stronger impact on how you feel than anything else present.  Also, think about the rules that your culture(s) and groups you’re a member of, national, or otherwise, share for spaces.

Be Comfortable

You’ll only ever be really comfortable in an area if you apply them, whether that relates to separating outdoor cooking zones from outdoor socializing areas or avoiding sitting in the sun or the shade or something completely different.  Design and use your yard and garden as you want (and the laws of your community sanction); don’t buckle to the whims of others, presented as trends or fashions.

Neuroscience research related to outside space design makes it clear how you can make the areas outside your home as comfortable as those inside it (well, as long as it’s not raining, and even rain isn’t a bummer when you have the right umbrella).