Ditch your old traditional wood furniture, trusty barbecue and bowling green lawn to make way for carpets of blue, crystal rocking chairs and state-of-the-art cookers in your outside space of the future, which once used to be lovingly called a garden.

Modern garden carpets and outdoor rugs mingle with crystal-like rocking chairs in a riot of colours, oversized outdoor sofas and rubberised tables in the 24-hour garden theme at this year’s Grand Designs Live at Birmingham’s NEC.

The weird and wacky furniture is accompanied by what can only be described as altars to outdoor dining, featuring enormous barbecues equipped with in-built refrigerators to keep all your beverages and food cold.

Out-of-this-world heating solutions, outdoor lighting and entertainment technology all feature at the heart of the exhibition in Grand Gardens, showing visitors how they can use their garden as an extra entertaining and living space all year round.

The core of the inspiration is The 24 Hour Garden, in which three interactive show gardens transform from day to night in minutes – an ‘outdoor living room’, complete with a ‘floating carpet’, the ‘tranquil escape’, with its unique boulder lounger and driftwood panelled walls, and the ‘contemporary kitchen garden for entertaining’, with its tea cup wall and bold dining set.

However, there’s a limit to extending the season and no one’s going to be out there fine-dining in the pouring rain, agrees award-winning TV garden designer James Alexander-Sinclair, who will be discussing The 24 Hour Garden at this year’s show.

“The point of 24-hour gardening is not so much sitting in it, but looking at it. You can sit in your sitting room and power a switch and there you have it.”

Does he approve of outdoor garden carpet? There’s a large pause followed by a snigger.

“I’m not quite sure what the point of it is,” he concedes. “Outdoor carpet’s a marvellous idea if you like outdoor hoovering. But it’s part of the idea of the garden being an extra room to the house.”

However, he’s more open minded to new-fangled furniture.

“There’s something rather wonderful about taking bits of inside outside. I remember one lunch party where we just took all the furniture outside and put it on the lawn. It was weird, wonderful and exciting.”

James comes up with somewhat more conventional ways of enjoying your garden all year round, such as placing winter-flowering plants with strong scents like Sarcococca confusa or winter-flowering honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima) near your front door.

Grand Designs Live Birmingham, NEC, October 7 to 9. Order tickets at granddesigns live.com or call the booking hotline on 0844 854 1348.