How to Use Landscaping to Boost Your Home’s Curb Appeal
Your front entry gives your neighbours, guests, and potential buyers their first impression of your home, so it’s essential to make sure it looks inviting and helps your home exude curb appeal.
Doing some landscaping work is a great way to achieve this.
What is Curb Appeal and Why is it Important?
Curb appeal refers to how attractive your home’s exterior and front property looks when being viewed from the street.
Creating an attractive view from the street is important for every homeowner, as it can help improve your chances of selling your home. Even if selling isn’t on your radar, having strong curb appeal can help to improve your property value along with your neighbourhood’s.
Design Elements that Help Boost Curb Appeal
So you’ve decided to start landscaping your front entry to make your property more attractive and boost your curb appeal. But with so many options, where do you even start?
Here are some of our recommendations for the top design elements you can incorporate in your front yard landscaping project.
Pillars
Pillars and columns are a great addition to your front entry, as they give weight and balance to your overall landscape design and create a strong visual appeal.
They also add an element of sophistication and elegance, and can be built using a variety of materials, styles, and colours to compliment both your home and your own personal taste.
Pillars and columns can also incorporate outdoor lighting fixtures to help brighten your porch, steps, and walkway in the evening.
Plantings and Grass
No matter how beautiful your home and front entry is, it will never be able to shine if people can’t see past tall grass and unkempt plants.
Maintaining a tidy, healthy lawn is a great –and easy– way to ensure that your home gets noticed for all the right reasons.
Also, try planting some flowers to add more life to your front yard. An even mix of plants and flowers will do wonders to make your front yard more eye-catching.
But keep in mind that too elaborate of a garden might not be embraced by some potential homebuyers.
If your garden requires lots of upkeep and maintenance, this can deter some buyers without a green thumb from putting in an offer.
When designing your new garden, a good rule of thumb is to keep things clean and simple and avoid planting large beds or plants that shed lots of petals or seed pods, and large shrubs that need a lot of work.
Ground Lighting
Good lighting is a must when it comes to both convenience, safety and good aesthetics. Consider installing motion-sensing lights near your front door or use low-voltage ground lights to help illuminate your front pathway.
Boulders
A rock garden can be a beautiful addition to any front lawn, particularly if you live in an area where it is difficult for plants and flowers to thrive.
Choosing natural-looking rocks that look as if they have always been a part of your landscape will best complement the existing vegetation in your yard.
Let’s say you’d like to have a woodland style rock garden. Try bringing in moss-covered rocks and gray boulders complemented by low-growing wildflowers like ferns and trilliums.
Multi-level rock gardens are also a great option to bring your gaze up from the ground and add some visual appeal.
Walkway
Well-designed walkways leading up to your front entry are a fairly simple way to make your home look and feel warmer and more inviting.
For a more dramatic improvement to an existing concrete path, replacing it with a contoured one made of interlocking stone or brick can instantly improve how your home looks from the street while adding a bit of charm to your entryway.
For a more subtle change, simply apply a coloured concrete resurface to your existing walkway and place some brick or stones around the border.
Add a Water Feature
Water features like ponds and fountains will add visual interest to your front yard and help produce a more calming environment.
Just the sound of flowing water alone can make your landscape feel more peaceful.
Keep in mind that if you plan to stick your new water feature with fish, it’s important to do your research and make sure that you know which fish will be suitable for the size of pond you are creating.
Bonus: Doors
Make a statement by giving your front door a pop of colour with a fresh coat of paint or by installing a new, custom wood door.
Just painting your door a new colour alone is an inexpensive and effective way to give your home’s first impression a total upgrade.
Make sure you choose a colour that not only coordinates with your home’s exterior, but also serves as a nice contrast.
- For example, if the outside of your home is white or grey, painting your front door bright red will really help it pop from the street.
- A turquoise door can also be a great addition to a light brown brick home.
- Burgundy, navy, grey, and yellow are some other popular options amongst most homeowners at the moment.
It doesn’t take much to spruce up your front entry landscaping. So why wait until you are ready to sell to start thinking about improving your curb appeal?
Regardless of if or when you plan to sell your home, taking on some landscaping projects can be done at any time to help make your front entry feel more like home, and increase your home’s property value when the time comes.
So, what are you waiting for? Contact your local landscape design experts today to get started.
