Extending your living space without adding on

Whether you live in a tiny apartment or a multi-winged mansion, there's something liberating and inspiring about being able to cast your eyes beyond your four walls and out into the world beyond. It's both restful and invigorating and will cure cabin fever in the dreariest weather. And if you can walk out into that space, you can enjoy first hand what it means to have an "outdoor" room.

But you don't have to "own" the surrounding property to "borrow" the surrounding views and make them part of your own living space. Is there a beautiful tree or building court yard or church steeple outside your window? If so, use window treatments (or lack thereof) that allow you to make the most of your borrowed view.

Finally, if your through the window views are, well, less than appealing--the brick building two feet away, for example--then you can create a "window" with a faux paint treatment or stencil or wallpaper mural or even a landscape painting that will bring that sense of freshness and expanse to even the tiniest of spaces. As somebody (Hannibal maybe?!) said, "If you can't find it, make it." There really are so many ways to extend your living space without adding on.

Take, for example, any window in your place. Look out the window. What do you see? If you own the surrounding property, is there a way you can work your garden to "frame out" a vista that can be viewed from the window? In my own house, since moving here 6 years ago, I've been progressively working to create pleasing 4 season vignettes through as many windows as possible. And where it's not possible, I play with window treatments and plants indoors to create pleasing indoor vignettes that play on the incoming light but keep the focal point indoors. In other parts of the house, I've created the illusion of windows where there aren't any by using drapes that appear to be covering a window but actually there's only a wall behind them. But the mind thinks "window" and it somehow opens up the space, even though the drapes are "closed."

The photo at the top of this post is the view outside my dining room window. Even though it's early Spring here in Boston, you can see that there is still a sense of a room outside, a view outside the window, which changes throughout the seasons. Plants and "hardscaping" (stone, brick, fencing, bench, etc.) were selected so that would be the case. The second photo is of a small heather garden bordering a ground-level deck, viewable from a stairwell window.

But because I have a small Boston lot, my views can only go so far. So, I "borrow" from neighbors' scenery whenever I can. For example, one neighbor has a rustic brown garage. This fits in with the more woodsy backyard garden I'm in the process of developing. So why try to hide it? It works perfectly. The neighbors in back, however, just have the back of their house staring us in the face and so I'm nurturing a tall mixed hedge of calocedrus decurrens (California incense cedar), an old rhododendron I had moved when the kitchen/mudroom renovation was happening and chamaecyparis that I hope will offer some needed privacy while still being airy, not overly dense.

Decks and balconies also can be made into outdoor "rooms," and window sills and window boxes can go a long way to enhance a window view, even if what's beyond is less than remarkable.

And when all other options are precluded, there's still faux windows and stencil or wall paper murals, even paintings, as mentioned above. For example, Jan Dressler has some amazing stencil and wallpaper murals that can achieve this end, even if you don't consider yourself "artistic." Jan does the work for you. Simply follow her instructions and use her stencils or wallpaper murals. The stencil above uses one of her kits to create a doorway and view to a garden and hills beyond. Check out Jan's website for inspiration, instructions and materials: www.dresslerstencils.com