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Before, worn-out materials, a skimpy front porch, and an awkward step-up to the front door made this bungalow a pass-by home on the street. After a few updated exterior entryway ideas, this bungalow bears little resemblance to its previous incarnation. A wider overhang shelters a remade front porch, with gracious columns sheathed in paint and brick.
This planting is located out on the lawn, several feet away from the front door. But from various points on the street, the two dwarf alberta spruce trees nicely frame the entryway. Like it or not we are an automotive society, and much of what we see is from the front seat of a car. A good designer also knows this and strives to avoid the frustration caused when it isn't clear where a visitor should park.
Front entry landscaping
This Colonial-style home broke up its static front with an elegant pergola and paved area that leads from the front door to garage, enabling the homeowners to better enjoy their neighborhood. Narrow plantings also soften the view, and a front door with side window panels gives more presence to the exterior entryway. This entry walk should be a central part of an integrated front yard landscape. Continue the look and feel of your special paving to the front porch and inside the foyer for a seamless connection. To avoid liability, be sure the surfacing you choose is slip-resistant in all weather.
Indeed, the brick columns must be larger here, to match the scale of their surrounding and to hold their own with the impressive array of perennials planted all around them. But it's quite a different matter when visitors must ascend a slope to approach your front door entrance. You have a practical, functional challenge with which to deal first and foremost. You must install landscaping that will provide access from the street to the front door entrance. Not only that, but it must be safe and must not encourage soil erosion on the slope.
Exterior Entryway Designs with Charming Curb Appeal
The worn-out siding was replaced with a stone pattern on the first floor and warm neutral on the second floor. Muted red shutters offer a pop of color, and cheery flowers replaced a row of boring front yard shrubs. A covered landing highlights the previously unadorned front door, and a dormer offers height and visual interest at the roofline. Those who approach this yard are virtually invited to set foot on the flagstone pathway and beckoned toward the door. Wraparound porches add charm, dimension, and outdoor living potential to exterior entryway designs. This traditional Victorian-style home benefitted from a front porch remodel that created a shady spot to relax along the front of the house.
When real estate agents talk about curb appeal, they're referring to the overall impact of a home when a prospective buyer drives by. This first impression is also shared by everyone who visits your home for the first time. But curb appeal is a brief impression compared to the arrival experience, which requires specific design concepts be integrated into a front yard.
Entryway Landscape Redesign
This Front Entry is Framed by a Lawn Planting A symmetrical planting on the lawn framing a front entry.David BeaulieuA planting doesn't have to be located smack up against a front entry to have an impact on it.. David Beaulieu is a landscaping expert and plant photographer, with 20 years of experience. He was in the nursery business for over a decade, working with a large variety of plants. David has been interviewed by numerous newspapers and national U.S. magazines, such as Woman's World and American Way.
Your landscape designer must integrate all three of these experiences correct in a cohesive, and more importantly, intuitive way. When done properly, the resulting composition will become your personal greeting to everyone who visits day or night. Pre-renovation, an oversize gambrel roofline on the garage disrupted the sight line, creating awkward views in the connection between house and garage.
Help your designer get this right and your home will literally beckon visitors to come inside. This awesome entry illustrates the benefits of overly wide steps as well as cantilevered tread nose which contains hidden lighting bars that make them stand out at night. Extending the depth of each step's tread proves a more attractive alternative to bunched steps and sloped walkways. But in this picture, the planting of geraniums in front of the ramp is so colorful that the eye tends to concentrate on the flowers, not the wooden structure. When reviewing your designer's plans, make sure all three experiences are well detailed.
An extended entry gives presence to the front door, and large concrete blocks play up the organic feel of the new exterior color scheme. For the most part, this brick home's entryway details worked well together, but a boring swath of ordinary lawn didn't match the elegance and grace of this home's architecture. Now, a wide, stone front walkway gives a feeling of discovery and importance to the home, and a formal collection of boxwood shrubs adds a touch of graciousness to the yard. On the facade, removal of first-floor shutters, new front windows, and redone brick details on the second story helped to better tie the two floors together. Sometimes a slope prevents a homeowner from enjoying outdoor spaces as they should.
In these pictures of landscaping showing front door entrances, I will provide examples of entryway plantings showing how each of these objectives can be met. Rather than depending solely on path lighting in the adjacent planter to show visitors where the edge of pavement lies, consider the aesthetics of lighting integrated into the steps themselves. Louvered vents set into the face of each step riser offers spots of brighter light along with easy bulb replacement. More complex are linear light bars built-in beneath the cantilevered tread nose of a step. If the visible riser is veneered with colored tile and bathed in linear lighting, this option can contribute outstanding night time sculptural qualities.
In this picture, the miniature decorative fences lead the viewer's eye nicely to the front door entrance. As in the prior picture, the picket style is used for these decorative fences. A common element of cottage-style landscape design, picket fences have a charm about them rarely matched by other fence types. In conjunction with the colorful snapdragon flowers, these parallel decorative fences soften the harshness of the pavement pathway. The original millwork, color, and distinguishing features of this home's exterior entryway were trapped in a time warp. The curb appeal upgrade demonstrates what you can accomplish even without a major addition or structural upgrade.
What makes a house exceptional is how its landscape greets people through a series of experiences, all of them well known to every landscape architect. When you come to understand them as well, you can help the designers exploit every opportunity when dealing with the conditions, challenges and opportunities of a home's front yard. This formal-style house is complemented nicely by the symmetrically arranged planting urns on its porch. The benefit to having a large stoop allows those in a group to stand comfortably as you come to the door. An arbor or overhead structure can be added to make this space more sheltered in inclement weather while punching out the visibility of a minimal doorway. When lots became smaller, builders began designing homes with the garage more prominent than the front door.
These front doors can be too narrow, recessed into the facade or pushed up against the garage. Jessica Bennett is an editor, writer, and former digital assistant home editor at BHG. She covers interior design, decorating, home improvement, cleaning, organizing, and more. She is currently pursuing an interior design certificate from the New York Institute of Art + Design.
Outdoor Structures
Note also the brick pathway leading from the fence to the front door entry; visually, it picks up the brickwork in the house across the street, suggesting that this landscape is right at home in its neighborhood. Previously hidden under a deep extended roofline, the front door felt unimportant, and old-fashioned colors and materials made the home feel nondescript. After an exterior entryway makeover, new shake shingles and bright white trim around windows and doors add charm to the home's front facade.
That was certainly the case with this front yard, where the steep angle had also presented a conundrum for the side yard walkway. Instead of abandoning the area, the homeowners embraced it, adding a short retaining wall and an elegant wrought-iron fence to establish firm borders. Overgrown trees and shrubs were tamed, too, replaced by small-stature shrubs and airy trees that enhanced the traditional shape of the home. A new neutral color scheme covered up the unsightly brick, helping to unify the exterior.
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