One very important finishing touch to put on your new custom home after it’s built is the landscaping. As beautiful as your new home is on the inside, you’ll want to make it equally beautiful on the outside, and that means carefully considered landscape design. Here are a few considerations to make when you think about your new home’s landscaping.
Accents
One important function of landscaping is to complement the house. Be sure to consider what the house looks like and work at highlighting some aspect of it with landscaping. Be sure not to obscure the entire house with overgrown foliage, but design the landscaping to carefully frame the yard and house.
Lines and Curves
Curving edges for planting beds and edging can give visual interest and help highlight certain portions of the yard, but don’t overdo the curves. Too many curving edges can create a visual mess, so be sure to balance the curves with straight lines. Give your eyes a chance to rest in certain places, and use the curves and lines to smoothly guide the viewer from accent to accent throughout the yard. It’s also a good idea to reflect the shapes you make in the specific plants you choose for the yard. So if you have a long, narrow planting bed, then long, narrow plants might visually complement the beds. Likewise, short, round bushes can complement wide, round planting areas.
Focal Points
Focal points are things that demand focus in the arrangement. These are often the first thing someone will notice about the yard and the area where they will look the longest. It’s important to establish what these focal points will be and to maintain them as focal points throughout the design. Don’t let other design elements overwhelm the focal points, but work at using other elements to highlight and complement the most interesting aspects of the landscaping.
Overall, landscaping is very important for the visual interest of a house, and you want to think carefully about the design of your yard and landscaping for your new custom home. On the other hand, you probably don’t want to get too intricate or try to make it too formal, as upkeep on symmetric or other formal designs can be very expensive or a lot of hard work. Keep the landscape relatively simple while also adding just enough visual interest to complement the home.
Be sure to stop by Harden Custom Homes or call us at (239) 205.5075 if you have any questions about building your own custom home.