Patio Covers Designs and Inspiration

How would you know if you had taken all of the factors into account?  This is where a professional designer could help.  Your patio cover designs will take on several different characteristics of both your home and your personal style and preferences.  We’ll get to a few of the options below, rest assured, there are many more than you will see here.  These just reflect a representative sampling of basic designs.  The way that you can improve or enhance these is almost infinite (and budgetless it seems at times).  In other words, imagining what you would like your patio cover to look like and be is up to your imagination and budget, because literally almost anything is possible with the type of building materials and equipment available to today’s builder.

General Covered Patio Plans

Before we go any further, let’s briefly describe the covered patio types you might encounter or want to have designed, they fall into some broad general categories.  First of all, there is the category of open or closed patio roof styles.  This is simply a reference to the fact that some allow you to see the sky and allow rain to get through, others allow partial light and/or rain and others would block all light and water or other elements from Mother Nature.  Then, you need to consider the type of building material:  wood, metal, vinyl, fabric or some combination of all of these.   Another choice concerns free standing versus attached structures.  Finally, you would need to decide if you wanted to have shades or awnings as part of your cover as well.

This is a lot to consider.  So, in order to make the process simpler, you can simply view the pictures below and read the captions.  In most cases, the picture represented is a good reflection of the type of patio cover you can expect to see or have built within that style.  Patio covers are like any type of home remodeling project in this way; what you see for your use and taste can be reflected in your home.

Following Are Some Patio Cover Ideas

Here is an example of an attached – with posts – pergola type patio cover.  That is a mouth-full.  See how the beam on one end is mounted to the house?  This adds strength as well as making it look tied into the home.  This type of cover is also open as you can see.  Wood patio covers like this would also include styles that would have more slats across the top and then even plants and vines growing atop it.  This provides more shade and a softer appearance, all while adding a splash of color or aroma from any flowering plants.  Photo credit

Then, there is the image of this much larger pergola or trellis used in a park.   You could achieve a similar look, using a

This is an example of an open patio cover - pergola, with vines.

metal material and having a variety of vines or climbing plants growing.  This has been discussed, but it is a nice way of softening the appearance of the harder lines of the pergola or other patio structure of your choice.

Photo credit

Finally, there is this example using a patio cover kit.  There are both vinyl (vinyl coated aluminum) that use embossed patterns to give them that wood grain appearance.

Photo courtesy of http://austinpatio.com