Why you need a mood board to create your perfect outdoor space.
I bet you’ve spent the last six months or six years swooning over Instagram re: outdoor spaces.
Dreaming that one day, when the budget (or significant other!) allows it, you’ll be able to sink your creative teeth into a project of your very own.
Maybe you’ve been pining over image after image, meticulously saving them into folders on your phone for when the time comes.
And I’ll tell you what, we love that for you.
But how do you make the most of all your thought? How do you bring together all those ideas when it comes to hedges and bench chairs, strawberry patches and waterfalls?
A mood board, my friends. And here’s why.
Inspiration:
Mood boards are all about collecting ideas from others who’ve been there before. What experiences have friends and family had? Who are the best trades and what do you need to look for? Exactly how are you going to fit a plunge pool in your front yard?
A mood board gives you the space to collate all this fun research, to help you understand what’s out there, what’s available, what’s in the market right now. It’s a tool to help you plan – and it will stand you in good stead when it comes to getting your outdoor space just right.
Integration
Sounds pretty obvious but mood boards work like this: they capture all your thoughts and feels about your outdoor space. In bringing these elements together mood boards work to create opportunities for even better ideas to come forth you have yet to even imagine. Being able to physically see everything and anything you’ve ever loved for your future outdoor space all in the one place is a great way to ignite new ideas and make conceptual connections – it’s also the perfect way to see where you’ve kind of ‘doubled-up’ in terms of your thinking. Too much sandstone up there? Not enough green? A mood board can help you see exactly what’s going on in your mind and also give you friendly hints about where you might go next.
Communication
How hard is it to truly explain what you want to feel when you’re in your brand-new outdoor space? How tricky is it to put your finger on exactly what you want to get out of your new backyard, that you just don’t get now? As they say, a picture says a thousand words and nothing could be more to the point when it comes to a mood board. Sometimes it’s really hard to explain what you like without showing a pretty pic, but it’s essential for when it comes to ensuring our team is absolutely across your needs and wants. Understanding your brief via a great chat and a gorgeous mood board ensures we know exactly what you love. Mood boards keep us all on the same page and gives us the intel we need to create your perfect landscape design.
Understanding
Our friend Simone Matthews from @soulhomeaus wraps this step up perfectly, and it’s what our landscape designers do with all of your pretty pictures. Apply the 70/20/10 rule. This gives us the clarity and direction we need to take your project to where you want to go. We identify the foundation style of your outdoors which becomes the 70%. The 20% is the complimentary style and the final layer becomes the 10%. Having this in mind when you’re collating all of your pictures will help you recognise style trends or help you to curate your own style!
So get cracking on that mood board, guys! But don’t worry, we LOVE talking shop so if a mood board isn’t for you then we know exactly the right questions to ask to design the perfect space. Get in touch, we’re ready for you.
