Pergola sizing feels abstract until you realise the pergola is not the thing you are measuring — the life underneath it is. A pergola is a roof over a table, a sofa, a walking path, a hosting habit. Start from that life, add honest margins, and the right size falls out almost automatically. This guide walks the method step by step, with real numbers for the furniture people actually own, the model-by-model options, and the two classic sizing regrets to dodge.
Step 1: measure the furniture, then add air
Get the tape measure and start with what will live under the roof:
- Dining for six — the table is roughly 6.5 × 3 ft. Now the honest additions: a chair pushed back to stand needs about 30 inches behind the table edge, and walking past a seated guest needs three feet. Run the numbers and a relaxed six-person dining zone wants about 10' × 13' of roof. It fits under 10' × 10' — but "fits" means chair legs at the roofline and rain on pushed-back shoulders.
- Dining for eight — an 8-foot table pushes the comfortable envelope to 10' × 16', with the length running parallel to the table.
- A lounge set — corner sofa, coffee table, maybe a chair: 10' × 10' feels generous for a compact set; 10' × 13' lets a full corner group breathe with a side table and a route through.
- Dining and lounging — the genuine outdoor living room is a 13-foot-depth story: 13' × 13' stacks the zones snugly; 13' × 16' and 13' × 19' give each zone its own address under one roof.
Notice the pattern: the furniture is never the problem — the humans moving around it are. Every sizing regret we hear traces back to margins, not tables.
Step 2: match the numbers to the models
- Pergola Piano — 10' × 10', 10' × 13' and 10' × 16', manual roof. Covers dining or lounging beautifully; the 10' × 16' hosts a long table with genuine grace.
- Pergola Equa — five sizes from 10' × 13' up to 13' × 19', electric with LED included. The 13-foot depths are where the full outdoor living room begins, and 13' × 19' is a room by any definition — 250 sq ft of adjustable roof.
- Pergola Equa — nine sizes including the in-between 11' widths (11' × 13', 11' × 16', 11' × 19'). These half-metre steps are quietly the most useful sizes in the range: exactly right for the countless terraces where 10' is tight, 13' swallows the garden, and the difference is one lounge chair.
A structural bonus of sizing smart: the compact widths carry the highest snow ratings — the 10-foot-wide electric sizes rate up to 320 kg/m² because shorter louvers carry more. Details in the table on each product page and in our ratings guide.
Step 3: respect the space around it
A pergola should sit in a garden, not instead of one.
- Breathing room: keep at least three feet to borders and fences where you can — for planting, for passage, and because a structure with space around it reads as designed rather than squeezed.
- Sight lines from inside: stand at the kitchen window and imagine the roof edge. A pergola placed with the view in mind furnishes the garden; one placed carelessly puts a beam across your favourite sightline for twenty years.
- Wall-mounted specifics: measure the available facade width between downpipes, windows, doors and the outdoor unit at mounting height — the facade, not the garden, sets the ceiling here. (Our mounting guide covers the rest of that decision.)
- Garden proportion: as a rule of thumb, when the roof would cover more than about a third of the garden, step back and look again — sometimes that's exactly right (small city courtyards live gloriously under full cover), but it should be a decision, not an accident.
Step 4: think two summers ahead
The most common thing we hear after delivery — by a wide margin — is "we should have gone one size up." Terraces attract life: the six-person table hosts eight the first birthday, a lounger appears, the heater joins in October and suddenly the winter furniture stays out. Almost nobody reports the opposite regret. If you are hesitating between two sizes and the space allows the larger, the larger is almost always right — the price difference is small against a decade of daily use, and the structure cannot be stretched later.
The second regret is subtler: sizing to today's furniture instead of the intended life. Buy for the terrace you are actually planning to live on, not the two chairs currently standing there.
When no standard size fits
Odd angles, very narrow plots, spans beyond 13' × 19', a roof that must thread between existing walls: that is what the custom pergola route is for — planned to your exact dimensions with the same engineering and documentation.
The shortcut
If you'd rather have the thinking done for you: the 1-minute quiz turns a few questions about seating and space into a concrete model-and-size recommendation, and a free quote with rough measurements — approximate is genuinely fine — puts a pergola expert on your specific terrace. Measure the furniture, add the air, and the rest is enjoyable.