When it comes to outdoor spaces, to the back gardens and patios that lie behind a million terraced houses, there are myriad different ways to “dress” them. Some people like to go the contemporary route – strict geometry and symmetry and an austere colour palette of green and white, with sleek, streamlined furniture. Others go for an old-fashioned, nostalgic mood involving a plethora of tubs and trellising filled with scented roses, climbing clematis and other traditional English garden flowers, with ornate cast-iron furniture. Yet others prefer Eastern exotica, with Moorish cushions, gazebos (to keep the rain off), fountains, orange trees and old Persian rugs strewn across the patio. This look can be a bit tricky to maintain during what passes for the British summer, but if you can face the lugging in and out, it can conjure up the most sumptuously colourful setting.

This year, there’s yet another strand emerging: surrealism. Trompe l’oeil in its most exuberant and eye-catching form is one of the more consistent themes emerging from the avant-garde design fraternity. Take Jeroen van der Kant’s wonderful blow-up version of a traditional Chesterfield sofa for Blofield. There it sits, looking for all the world as if it’s strayed from some stuffy Victorian interior, but instead of wool, velvet and horsehair, it is made of the same sort of light materials as you would find in life rafts. You need to be near a power point to inflate it with the pump provided, but according to the blurb, this takes a mere five minutes. It’s £350 from www.design-conscious.co.uk and is available now in white (dark green, much the nicest in my view, comes in at the end of August, and brown later still). In time for next summer, there will be a three-seat version as well as a blow-up armchair and a pouffe. But if you fancy the white one, move fast – waiting lists are building up.

Just as much fun is the Dalilips sofa by Spanish company BD (Barcelona Design), which takes Salvador Dali’s famous red-lip sofa and reproduces it in plastic for the great outdoors. The idea came from Dali’s 1936 painting of Mae West, in which he imagined the screen goddess’s face as a room in which her blonde tresses were the curtains, her nose a fireplace, her come-to-bed eyes paintings, and her luscious lips a sofa. The great French furniture designer Jean-Michel Frank was the first to turn this fantasy into reality, and Spanish designer Oscar Tusquets had the notion of turning it out in pink polyurethane foam in 1972. It now comes in a more durable spin-moulded polyurethane and costs £1,610 from Chaplins (020-8421 1779; www.chaplins.co.uk). In a similar vein, and also from Chaplins, is Ross Lovegrove’s Lovebench. It’s made of rotation-moulded plastic, comes in nine colours (blue is surprisingly cheering) and costs from £2,820.

If you prefer something gentler on the eye, Priscilla Carluccio’s eclectic new shop Few and Far at 242 Brompton Road, London SW3 (www.fewandfar.net; 020-7225 7070) is in high-summer mode at the moment, and has perhaps the best collection of two traditional French café furniture brands: Tolix and Drucker. Tolix, which makes that classic metal café furniture we know and love, was founded by Xavier Pauchard, who, in 1907, started a new industry when he developed a method of protecting sheet metal from rust by plunging it into zinc. The range has been updated, but has the same classic feel. Few and Far has the Kub table (£360) and the Chaise A (£220, or £250 with seat pad).

Drucker is another long-established French company and was the first to produce hand-made rattan furniture in France. The material looks as if it’s plastic, but in fact the chairs and tables are constructed using Rilsan, which is made from the seeds of the castor-oil plant, which are pressed together with oil, dyed, set and woven together. Few and Far has chairs and tables in blue or black and white at prices ranging from £295 for a Gitane blue Fouquet chair to £850 for a Circular Tric Trac table. If you’d like the whole French café look, you can add in vintage Ricard carafes for £25, bowls from £12.50, and heavy wine glasses for £3.95.

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