Last updated 27 July 2026
They spent the holiday money on the terrace instead. Here is what changed.
Three families, in three countries, made the same decision about their outdoor space. None of them describe it as a furniture purchase. All of them describe what changed afterward in almost the same words.
Words by
Ida Lindqvist
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Published on: July 22, 2026
Ask people how they plan a summer and a familiar shape appears. Everything points at two weeks somewhere else.
The months before are preparation. The weeks after are recovery. The rest of the season is something you pass through on the way.
Plenty of families are quietly rearranging that. The trip stays, but it gets shorter, and more of the season gets spent at home on purpose.
Which raises a fair question about the part of the home that season actually happens in.
For five months of the year, the terrace is the room the family actually lives in
Call it a terrace, a balcony, a roof terrace, or the part of the garden nearest the door. From May to September it is where dinner happens.
It is where the long phone calls happen. It is where guests end up, no matter which room you invited them into.
And in most homes, it is the only room that was never really finished.
Every other room received attention. The kitchen was renovated over months. The living room was decided carefully, with samples and second opinions and one argument about a rug.
The terrace got whatever was available, bought in a hurry one April, and it has stayed that way ever since.
Zurich: 18 square meters that used to hold a drying rack
Sofia and Martin live on the fourth floor in Zurich. Their balcony is 18 square meters and faces west, toward the hills.
For six years it held two folding chairs, a plastic table and the washing. They thought of it as storage that happened to have a view.
Last spring they emptied it completely and treated it as a room. Low seating along the long wall, one rug, one table, and nothing else.
They now eat outside from the middle of May until the end of October. Martin says the apartment feels a third bigger, which is not true... but it is exactly how it feels.
Utrecht: the terrace where people finally stayed past nine o'clock
Lena and Peter have a 32 square meter terrace behind their house in Utrecht, two teenagers, and a large dog.
Their problem was never space. It was that nobody stayed outside for very long.
The old chairs were tolerable for twenty minutes. After that, people drifted back indoors and the terrace went quiet by nine.
They replaced everything with deep, soft seating in one continuous run along the fence. Their daughter's friends now come to the house on Friday evenings instead of going into the city.
Lena says this was not the plan, and it is the best thing that has happened.
The comparison a lot of families are quietly running
Add up one week away for a family of four. Flights, an apartment near the water, the car, and the meals out every evening.
You know your own number better than anyone reading this could guess. For a great many families it lands somewhere close to €3,000.
That week is wonderful. It is also seven days, and then it is over.
A lounge set at a similar price is not seven days. It is there for every warm evening, for as many summers as it lasts.
Divide it honestly and the number stops feeling large. A €2,816 set across ten summers is €282 a summer, which is less than most families spend on one evening out.
Nobody is arguing that furniture is better than travel. The argument is smaller and far more practical. You get one week from one of them and ten years from the other.
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The award-winning lounge set combines 4 modules to create the ultimate outdoor lounge experience. With its versatile design, you can easily mix and match the pieces to form various combinations, offering both flexibility and style to your outdoor space.
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Dimension Width: W 305 cm (+ Puff)
What all three of these families did was the same, and it had nothing to do with style
None of them started with a design decision. Every one of them started with a practical one.
They bought furniture they could leave outside. Permanently. Through rain, through frost, through August sun, without carrying anything anywhere.
That single decision is what turns a terrace into a room. A space you have to prepare before you can use it is not a room — it is a project, and projects get postponed.
TROISPOMMES HOME was built for precisely this way of living. The Danish family-owned brand makes lounge furniture designed to stay outside all year, in Alpine winters and Mediterranean summers alike.
The fabric is 100% olefin-based, Oeko-Tex® certified and SGS tested. It is water, frost, stain, pet and UV resistant, and it stays water-repellent year-round.
The filling is adjustable high-density PU foam, which is why people sit in it for three hours rather than twenty minutes.
Valencia: the summer that starts at seven in the evening
Elena and Marco have a 24 square meter roof terrace in Valencia. For most of the summer it is too hot to use until around seven in the evening.
So that is when their day begins. They eat at nine, and people stay until midnight.
Every August their grandchildren arrive for two weeks. Elena stopped worrying about the furniture the first time a glass of red wine went across a cushion... and came out of the cover in a 30°C wash.
She describes the change in a single sentence. She stopped saying "be careful" to children on her own terrace.
Ninety-six percent of owners report less stress and worry about stains, and this is what that number looks like in a real house.
"The evenings that run long are the entire point"
Each of these families describes the same outcome in different words. People stay.
The reason is not hospitality. Nobody willingly leaves a comfortable seat, and nobody wants the meal to move indoors halfway through.
This is usually the moment the cooking moves outside as well. The Lounge Grill puts seating and grill into one designed space, so whoever is cooking is not standing alone with their back to the conversation.
It is the difference between hosting people and sitting with them.
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Terraces are rarely finished in one purchase
There is a reason the same Danish brand turns up in Zurich, Utrecht and Valencia, in three completely different climates.
More than 50,000 customers across Europe have bought it, and it holds 4.9 out of 5 from over 4,500 reviews.
In 2026 the design won an iF Design Award, chosen from 10,000 submissions from 68 countries by 129 international design experts.
The buying pattern says something the reviews do not. People come back.
One owner opened his message by saying he had bought from the brand once before, some time ago, and wanted to add to what he had. Another mentioned, almost as an aside, that she had just ordered more.
Most of these terraces are built up across two or three summers, one piece at a time, which is exactly how the range is designed to be bought. Individual pieces start at €317.
The other pattern is that purchases are almost always tied to a date.
One customer, ordering in early spring, explained the timing in a single line. Their new terrace would be ready then.
Another wrote in June because she needed the rest of her sofa for her birthday party the following week.
Nobody buys outdoor furniture in the abstract. They buy it because something is about to happen, and they want the space to be right when it does.
Free shipping across Europe takes 3–5 days, which is usually the difference between a terrace being ready for the occasion and being ready just after it.
Quetions?
"This is a lot of money for furniture that lives outside."
That is the correct way to think about it, and it is why the guarantees are what they are. Every set carries a 5-year warranty including full replacement in case of product defects, plus 30 days to return it and get your money back.
"Do I have to buy a whole set at once?"
No, and most people do not. The range is modular, so a great many owners begin with one or two pieces and add to them the following summer. Individual pieces start at €317.
"What happens to it in winter?"
It stays where it is. The fabric is frost resistant and water-repellent year-round, there is no oiling, and there is no autumn ritual of carrying everything into a garage.
The room you use most, finally finished
The families in this article did not spend more than they planned. They spent it somewhere different, and on something that was still there the following May. A terrace comfortable enough to hold people until midnight is not a luxury purchase in any ordinary sense. It is the room you use most, finally finished, and it is covered by a 5-year warranty and 30 days to change your mind.
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