As you approach your home, you might notice that your front yard isn’t living up to its full potential. It may feel incomplete or even boring. The perception of your home by visitors is partly dependent on the appearance of your front yard. The front yard will even set the mood for you and your family as you return home. Updating your front yard landscape to employ a layered texture with focal points will improve how everyone sees your home. Here’s how landscaping companies create front yard focal points in Sterling Heights and Macomb, MI.
The Walkway
A walkway is so much more than a way to get from here to there. It’s an opportunity to make a design statement. Use materials such as natural stone, clay bricks, or concrete pavers to complement (not match) the home and create a beautiful transition between the home and the surrounding landscape. As a focal point, a walkway can be a natural choice especially if you use eye-catching materials and interesting laying patterns.
Decluttering
The most successful front yards tend to be free of clutter. This can be the best way to show intentional design in a landscape. Before any landscape work begins, you could think about which existing plants will continue to dictate the layout of your front yard and make sure there are no trees or shrubs that create an obstacle course as visitors approach the front door.
Large trees could act as anchor points while you may want new hardscape features to take over the previous unwanted overgrowth of shrubs, grasses, and other plants.
Intelligent Outdoor Lighting Design
Most front yards need to put an emphasis on the walkways leading to the home. Creating a safe environment is absolutely crucial in the overall perception of your home, and effective walkway lighting is the best way to make this happen. Once that baseline has been taken care of, you can take care of the aesthetics with a layered lighting design.
The front door should be the primary focal point of the front yard, so use lighting design to lead the eyes of visitors toward it. The front door itself could be highlighted using a series of light fixtures that offer a warm welcome.
To prevent an overly stark contrast between a well-lit walkway and entryway and the surrounding landscape, consider using a layered approach. This strategy involves a series of subtle lighting fixtures on the walkway itself to illuminate the walking surface, and somewhat more dispersed lighting in the surrounding landscape to add dimension and ambient light.
Spotlighting a single tree, sculpture, water fountain, or other stand-alone element can create a natural focal point after dark.
A Warm Embrace
Using minimalism as a design strategy will help create focal points in the front yard as well as improve its aesthetics. Let the lines of the walkway guide the eye toward the front door, but make the journey an interesting one with special features along the way.
You could also use a low retaining wall along the outer edge of the walkway to create a feeling of embrace—the wall itself becomes a focal point, and visitors get the feeling that the walkway is already within the “inner sanctum” of the home and visually sheltered from the outside world.
Related: What Landscaping Companies Suggest To Beautify a Driveway in West Bloomfield Township and Troy, MI
Image source: Unilock
