Designing Outdoor Amenity Space That Actually Gets Used

Every multifamily pro forma has a rendering of a rooftop deck full of people, string lights, and skyline views. Move-in day comes and goes, and six months later that same deck sits empty most evenings while residents hang out in the parking lot or their own units instead. The gap between an amenity space that photographs well and one that actually gets used isn't really a design-taste problem — it's a landscape architecture problem, and it gets solved (or doesn't) long before anyone picks out furniture. Across nine recent projects — from a 112-unit luxury building in St. Louis Park to a 72-acre master-planned community in Victoria — the pattern holds regardless of project type or scale.

Location and Exposure Decide More Than the Design Does

Before finishes or furniture ever come up, the physical placement of a space does most of the work of determining whether it gets used. A rooftop deck with a great skyline view but no wind protection turns into a space people visit once for the photo and avoid after that — rooftop exposure is a real design constraint, not a minor detail, especially in a climate with the wind and temperature swings we get here. Sun and shade balance across the day matters just as much: a west-facing deck that's unusable at 5 p.m. in July misses exactly the hours residents are most likely to use it.

Sightlines matter too. Space residents walk past on their way somewhere else gets incidental use — someone stops for five minutes because it's right there. Space that requires a deliberate decision to visit — up an elevator, down a hallway, out of the way — needs to be worth the trip every time, which is a much higher bar.

Amenity Packages Scale With Product Position — But the Same Rules Apply

On Archer Apartments in the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood, we paired a rooftop deck with city views with a separate ground-level outdoor patio designed specifically for pedestrian activation. Those two spaces aren't redundant — they serve different behavior. The rooftop is destination space: residents plan to go up there, often with guests, for a specific occasion. The ground-level patio is passive activation space: people pass by it daily, and its presence alone makes the building feel more alive at street level, whether or not anyone's actively sitting in it that day. A common lounge with a kitchenette gives that ground-level space a natural indoor extension, so it functions in more weather than an outdoor-only patio would.

Parkway 25, a 112-unit LEED-certified building near the Cedar Lake Trail and Lake Bde Maka Ska, takes a similar layered approach pitched toward a higher-end resident: a club room, fitness center, outdoor pool deck, and a secluded zen courtyard, plus elongated private balconies on every unit that give residents their own outdoor space without having to leave the unit at all. The lesson isn't "more amenities equals more use" — it's that a range of spaces at different levels of privacy and effort (a balcony steps away vs. a pool deck that's a planned outing) means residents have somewhere to go regardless of how much time or energy they have that day.

Silver Lake Crossing Apartments in Rochester took a more restrained approach and it still works, because the same underlying principle is at play. Rather than one flashy centerpiece amenity, we designed two distinct public sitting spaces integrated with native shade trees and blooming perennials, plus a dedicated dog run — modest, but placed where residents actually move through the site daily.

Master-Planned Communities Need Amenities That Scale With the Neighborhood, Not Just the Building

Marsh Hollow is a different order of project entirely: a 72-acre mixed-use residential development in Victoria with 110 single-family rental lots and 103 row townhomes, master-planned with the City of Victoria as its first rental single-family home community. At that scale, "amenity space" stops being a rooftop deck and starts being neighborhood infrastructure — 7.14 acres of dedicated parkland supporting a pool and clubhouse, a baseball field, six pickleball courts, a soccer field, a playground, a dog park, and a public shelter. The plan also preserved an old-growth wooded area on site, folding it into the community's amenity identity rather than clearing it.

Letting Infrastructure Do the Work: When Engineering Frees Up Land for Amenities

This is where site engineering and landscape architecture overlap the most, and where the biggest opportunities usually get missed on tighter sites. Trails Edge South, an affordable housing development in Waconia overlooking Interlaken Park, is a clean example: rather than dedicating ground-level acreage to a traditional surface retention pond, we used an underground stormwater management system, which freed up that land for a landscaped playground, a community patio positioned to take advantage of the park views, and a direct public trail connection. On an affordable housing budget, that land wasn't optional square footage — it was the difference between a development with real outdoor amenity space and one without.

Bridgewater Bank Headquarters applies the same logic on a commercial site. An underground stormwater detention system handled site drainage without giving up surface land to a pond, which made room for outdoor patio and amenity deck space around the four-story office building.

On The Maker, a mixed-use live/work building on just a 0.25-acre footprint in Minneapolis, the approach is smaller in scale but the same idea in spirit. Stormwater design wasn't technically required on that site, but we incorporated small rain garden BMPs anyway — and on a tight urban infill lot, a rain garden designed with the same attention as an ornamental planting bed does its job managing runoff while adding usable, attractive green space at the same time, instead of competing with the building footprint for square footage.

Padraig's Brewing Patio takes that same "let the stormwater feature be the amenity" idea and turns it into the centerpiece. Converting a 60,000-square-foot industrial building into a mixed-use brewery and retail center, we engineered a multi-functional patio built around a landscaped drainage way and rain garden, crossed by custom pedestrian bridges connecting different activity zones, anchored by a tiered outdoor amphitheater and a multi-level water fountain, with installation art built from recycled limestone salvaged from the historic Minneapolis Metropolitan Building woven through the plantings. The stormwater infrastructure isn't hidden on this project — it's the reason the space has character.

Senior Living Runs on Different Rules

Broadwell of Plymouth, a 130-unit senior housing development offering independent living, assisted living, and memory care, is a good reminder that "amenity space that gets used" means something different depending on who's using it. Restaurant-style dining, a club room, café, fitness and spa facilities, and multiple activity spaces are all about daily routine rather than occasional destination use, and a walking path across the site supports the kind of low-impact daily activity that matters most for this resident population. The design goal wasn't a showpiece — it was an environment residents move through comfortably every day.

What Actually Drives Repeat Use

Across all nine of these projects, a few things separate amenity space that gets used in month eleven from space that only gets used at the leasing tour or the ribbon-cutting: shade and shelter that make a space usable across more of the day and more of the year, not just a sunny afternoon in June; a reason to be there beyond seating — a pool, a fire feature, a dog run, a trail connection, or a lounge with a kitchenette that gives an outdoor space a natural indoor extension; amenity infrastructure that does double duty, whether that's a rain garden that's also a gathering space or an underground stormwater system that frees up land for one; and plantings and hardscape chosen for how they hold up under real maintenance budgets and real Minnesota winters, not just how they look in a rendering.

The Takeaway for Developers

Bring landscape architecture into the amenity conversation early — while site programming and floor plans are still being worked out, not after the rooftop access point and the stormwater strategy are already locked. On projects ranging from a quarter-acre infill site to a 72-acre master plan, that early coordination between landscape architecture and civil engineering is consistently what separates amenity space that shows well in a rendering from space that's still getting used years after lease-up.

Planning amenity space for an upcoming project? Contact our team early — the earlier we're in the conversation, the more the site can actually do for you.