How purposeful architectural elements can transform your home’s relationship with the outdoors

There’s a shift happening in how our clients think about their homes — and it’s one we’ve been designing for years. The backyard is no longer a place you glance at through a window. It’s a room. In many of our projects across Malibu, the Palisades, and Calabasas, the outdoor living area has become the most-used space in the home.

But creating an outdoor room that truly works — that you actually use year-round, that feels as intentional as your kitchen or great room — requires thinking architecturally. Not decoratively.

Here are the elements we think about most — and how we’ve applied them.

The overhead plane: shade, shelter, and the feeling of enclosure

The single most transformative element in any outdoor room is what’s happening above your head. An uncovered terrace is a transition zone. Give it a ceiling — even a permeable, adjustable one — and it becomes a place.

We’ve been specifying the Renson Pergola system on select projects for exactly this reason. At our Castilian Remodel, the pergola defined an outdoor living and dining zone that reads as a true extension of the interior great room. The louvered system allows the clients to dial in light and airflow — fully open on a cool Los Angeles morning, partially closed during peak afternoon sun. Architecturally, it anchors the space without closing it off.

The roof deck: reclaiming underused square footage

Roof decks are one of the most underutilized opportunities in residential design, particularly in hillside and canyon properties where views are the entire point.

For our Sea Level project, working with interior designer Nathan Turner, we explored the use of a simple fixed pergola as part of a roof deck program that needed to address wind, sun exposure, and the desire for a genuinely livable outdoor space — not just a deck with furniture on it. Designing a roof deck as a programmed room, with shaded zones, defined seating areas, and considered circulation, changes how clients relate to that level of the home entirely.

Brise soleil: where sun control becomes architecture

Shading is often treated as an afterthought — an awning added after the fact, a umbrella moved around with the sun. At Hayne, we prefer to integrate sun control into the architecture itself.

The Renson Brise Soleil system is one we’ve designed into our modern Calabasas Lot 2 residence, and it’s one of our favorite examples of a product that operates simultaneously as a functional shading solution and as a defining architectural feature. The horizontal fins read as part of the building’s composition. They aren’t applied to the facade — they are the facade, at that moment.

Thinking in rooms, not amenities

The mistake most homeowners make when planning outdoor space is thinking in terms of amenities — I want a grill, a fire pit, some outdoor furniture. The better frame is: what rooms do I want outside, and what does each room need to function?

A covered dining room needs an overhead plane and lighting. A lounging room needs enclosure on at least two sides and sun control. An outdoor kitchen is a working room — it needs task lighting, ventilation, and surfaces designed for use, not just for photographs.

When we begin any project that includes meaningful outdoor living — and in the coastal and hillside neighborhoods of Los Angeles, that’s nearly all of them — we start the outdoor programming at the same time as the interior. Because the best indoor/outdoor homes aren’t ones where the outside was added on.  They’re the ones where inside and outside were designed together, as one.