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
From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
From mud baths to herbal massages, Fiji’s heat rituals turned one winter escape into a soul-deep reset.
Studio apartments have almost disappeared from new Australian developments. Lura is bringing them back to Burleigh Heads from $495,000.
