Sunrooms offer a quiet retreat from the regular bustle of a busy home. With natural sunlight passing through and a clear view of your immediate outdoors, it can be the most relaxing place of the house and a great area to bring family and friends together. Of course, designing your sunroom is your business. If you need a little help when deciding on arrangements to make for it, though, here are a few things I picked up while working our own.

Light Colors

A sunroom really benefits from light colors. It helps keep the room warm during cold weather and cooler during the summer. Set against the backdrop of your garden and the outdoors, the transition looks more natural and pleasant on the eyes.

Accessories

For aesthetic purposes, certain decorative fixtures work really well with sunrooms while others don’t. Generally, the more nature-based the items, the more fitting it will be. As such, furnitures and treatments made from wood, wicker, bamboo and straws work really well. Similarly, decorative items like fountains and other water structures can also help enhance it.

Our own sunroom currently sports wooden seatings and bamboo tables, with straw mats lying all around. We’ve also put a few plants in there to enhance the space and it works really well. I also wanted an indoor pool but after wracking our brains measuring everything, we finally decided it wouldn’t fit, so we put in a six-person spa instead.

Seasons

By the way, it would help a lot if you can figure out ways to use your sunroom for all seasons. Being, perhaps, the most energy-inefficient room in the house, it can prove unbearable to stay there during extreme weather conditions. Early on, try to see if it’s possible to extend your home’s heating and cooling to the area. If you can’t, installing a separate climate control system should figure prominently on your to-do list. Why spend so much time decorating, after all, if you can’t use it all year round?