15 Outdoor Entertainment Ideas For Any Occasion
5 min
The backyard has never had more significance than it has in the past few years. Make the most of your outdoor spaces with modifications, renovations and extensions to create an outdoor room you can really embrace.
Easy Access
Nothing beats an easy exit – especially when it’s to an outdoor paradise. It’s all about connection – so glass is king. Steel doors are the thing offering strength and versatility in design – fabulous in edgy modern homes, as well as traditional country estates.
Throw some shade
Enjoying the outdoors is easier if you aren’t being blinded by glare; and nothing is more flattering than the light under a shade. Generous, colourful market umbrellas, or vast cloth shades that can be extracted from a cassette on a wall, or remote controlled louvres.
Dive into a sunken courtyard
When a pool is no longer a drawcard, some clever designers have turned them into sunken lounges, it’s re adaptive use, with an intimate space for those memorable get togethers.
Fill it with a purpose
For families, it’s an absolute ball to spend time outside together, and a little coaxing with playground equipment makes the garden absolutely magnetic. Add a little, or a lot. It is an investment in beautiful memories, that last a lifetime.
Outside can be anywhere – not just the backyard
Reclaiming space down the side of a terrace house is absolutely brilliant. Top outside living spaces can be reclaimed from boring walls in narrow kitchens. Superb extensions of indoors, yet with all the chill value of being outdoors, achieved in such a small space.
The power of the labyrinth
Giving outdoor spaces a pathway and a purpose is an ideal design for outdoor peace. Meander a curving pathway, or be a geometry geek and create parterre garden. Either way, letting a path lead you, through a labyrinth of any size, makes your stress dissolve, and peace will follow each of your steps.
Now THAT’S a bar be que
Eating outside? Everything tastes better in the outdoors, and manufacturers know it. Outside ‘kitchens’ offer a purpose to be outside, while anchoring your space. Go the whole hog with plumbing and TV, or simple, with deck chairs and an old-fashioned barbie. Soak it in, and eat it up.
Pool your resources
A swimming pool is hard work (unless you have the great fortune to be able to sub it out), but absolutely worth the fun and beauty it brings to the table. Night time around a garden pool is nothing short of perfection. And how about watching the steam rising off heated water? Ethereal.
Invite friends over – the ones with feathers.
The perfect outside space is often shared with wild friends – and if we build it, they will come. Birdbaths, birdhouses, ridiculously over the top feeders all add texture and adventure to an outdoor space, plus a never-ending soap opera to watch from dawn to dusk.
Hide in plain sight in an ideal outside space
Landscape architects and designers have made playing hide and seek a profitable game. Getting rid of prying neighbour eyes is vital to that feeling of privacy. From green walls to exotic screens, even outdoors in high density can become a private oasis.
Moving water is a salve for the soul
Even the sweetest, most petite water feature can transform an uninviting space into a well of well-being. Up the size and up the response. With or without fish, having water move around you while experiencing the outdoors is an absolutely primal delight.
Embrace the exuberance of being outside in the cold
You feel alive in the cold – for a little while. However, you feel completely alive in the cold outdoors entertaining space, when there’s a fire pit warming the cockles of your heart. A fire brings focus to a get together – comradeship thrives in the glow of a fire.
Furnish, or fit out – lounging is a top priority
Built-in benches are an instant draw card – throw a few scatter cushions about, pop the umbrella up and you have rustic escapism. But, but, if you can be bothered with stacking lounge pillows under cover, a full-on lounge suite is the ants’ pants in outside luxury.
Nightime is light time
Nights can be transformative – for you and the space. Suspended festoon lighting, or masses of twinkling bud lights wrapped around the trees, or strategic up lights and subtle under seat lighting – all perfect while watching a movie on the drop down screen.
If you live in a space where all this is simply a field too far…
Visiting someone else’s outside space, lolling about in their chairs, inspecting their gardens, watching their dogs romp across the lawn is an indulgently lazy way to experience the joy of the perfect outside lifestyle
For Central Element, the start of work at Pearl represents another step in the company’s growing eastern suburbs pipeline.
All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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