All Calgary homeowners know the importance of maximizing your outside time. The window to enjoy your garden in the city is limited by the longer winter months, but it can also be hampered by the strong sun and winds that come with the warmer weather. With this in mind, investing in some sort of cover for your patio is an essential home improvement project, as you not only get shade all summer long, but it also helps you to create defined spaces outdoors. This is great if you have a large patio area, but also you can benefit from a patio cover design with a smaller patio to help make a transitional space from your home to your garden.
What Is A Hybrid Patio Cover?
When it comes to patio cover, it can feel like you have two main options. The first is the more traditional solid patio cover, made from either aluminum or acrylic. This gives you full protection from the sun, wind and occasional rainstorm, but can be heavy and not particularly beautiful. The other is a pergola design where you get the beauty of a lattice above your head and a strong post and beam structure to support it, but you’ll still have gaps for the sun to break through. A better option all round is to talk with Desert Sun Patios about our hybrid patio covers. These are custom made designs that provide sections of latticed cover and solid cover to create unique spaces on your patio.
Hybrid Patio Cover Designs
Given the custom nature of hybrid patio covers, you can create just about any sort of design you like. However, some popular hybrid patio cover designs you should know about include:
- Central lattice – to give your outdoor space the feel of a European courtyard, consider a patio cover design where you have sections of solid cover on the outside of your patio with a lattice section directly over the middle. This works perfectly for a seating arrangement with a central feature like a fountain or a fire pit, as the sunlight will put a spotlight on it throughout the day.
- Central cover – the inverse of the central lattice design, you can create a unique dining area by putting a solid patio cover over the center of your outdoor space. This will provide shade and protection for your food, and the latticed edges of your patio will create beautiful shadows and breezes to keep you and your guests cool all summer long.
- Divided spaces – a final popular hybrid patio cover design is to split your patio into two distinct areas, and mark these by having different patio coverings over each one. A common way to divide your outdoor space is to have a solid cover attached to the house to provide a sense of transition and protection to the doors and windows, and have a latticed portion further away to encourage people to sit further out towards the garden.
It’s good to know that patio covers can also protect an area from strong winds. I sometimes work outside in my patio for a change of scenery so I tend to have a lot of documents on the table over there. Having patio cover will surely be important to have in the near future.