Can you live without a backyard?

The Australian dream has always included a backyard but with the rise of mixed-use apartment precincts featuring increasingly more innovative on-site amenities, do you really need one? Can you achieve the same things in an apartment with a balcony as you would in a house with a backyard? Let’s take a look.

Dinner parties

Do you love to host outdoor dinner parties during the warmer seasons? You don’t have to give that up just because you don’t have a backyard. New apartment developments come with outdoor entertaining areas which are seamlessly connected to indoor spaces. Additionally, you can choose an apartment in a building with on-site amenities like lounge and dining areas. For instance, Omnia Potts Point in Sydney has gorgeous rooftop outdoor entertaining facilities showcase stunning views of the Sydney Harbour and CBD. 

Image: Omnia Potts Point

Pets

If you have enough space and the right breed of dog, you don’t need a backyard. Many apartments are now being built with larger floorplans and extensive balconies or terraces. West End in Sydney, for example, includes a semi-enclosed balcony and Pace of Blackburn in Melbourne offers apartments with balconies ranging up to 75 sqm — that’s plenty of room for Fido.

Image: Pace of Blackburn

Children

If your kids prefer reading and playing games than running around then you don’t need a backyard. Even if your kids are more physically active, you can live in an apartment with lots of fun on-site amenities like a swimming pool and rooftop gardens. This way, your kids will have plenty of opportunities to wear themselves out, and potentially meet other kids in the building, too.

Iskia in Canberra has an entire ground floor plaza where kids can muck around in water play features while Melbourne Square has a massive 3,745 sqm park with European-inspired piazzas and outdoor terraces. And a number of apartments are being developed in coastal areas like Mahala in Mermaid Beach so the beach is literally minutes from your doorstep.

Image: Mahala, Mermaid Beach

Garden

Even with a small balcony space, you can still incorporate natural elements in your outdoor area. Robyn Nutt, an avid gardener, had to downsize from Brisbane to an apartment in the Sunshine Coast’s Moolaba, and she was worried she’d have to put her gardening gloves away for good. But when she moved, she found it was surprisingly easy to create a garden in her new residence. 

"We've got a wall of flowers that we're hoping to grow over some wires for a bit of privacy down one side of our bedroom. They are dipladenias and they're growing over some wire structure and I just help guide them up," she said in an interview with the ABC. Her pro tip? You just have to be creative.

Read about how to grow your own herb garden here.

Source: ABC news