Luxury Front Yard Landscape
The purpose of a luxury front yard landscape is to create an outdoor living space that mirrors the refined interior of the house. This transforms your entire property into a symbol of a higher quality of life which can be experienced by your guests both indoor and out. Since every resdidence is unique, luxury designs are highly customized to architectural style and the personal sensibilities of the residents.
Ones style of luxury front yard landscape has proven very effective in the custom home market. This style uses multiple retaining walls and stepped terraces to add vertical impact to the property in front of the house. Houston is notorious for flat terrain that often appears boring to people who have recentlhy moved here. The remarkable thing about retaining walls and stepped terraces is that they do not have to be very high at all to create the impression that a home is built on a hillside. So long as the eye moves upward from point to point, the home ultimately looks elevated as the centerpiece of lifestyle that the entire property now supports.
Another style of luxury front yard landscape works superbly for homes built with a distinctively Mediterranean architecture. This involves constructing a brick driveway that expands and encircles a custom fountain as it approaches the front of your home. If your home has separate wings that create something of a natural courtyard between the outer walls, this is an excellent place to construct a parking loop or a motorcourt for visitors. Again, an islands garden or fountain in the center of the drive will liven up the hardscape and compliment the tropical vegetation that lines the sides of the home.
If you are willing to invest in tree services, a crowning effect that will add a distinctively Mediterranean look to your luxury front yard landscape. Houston’s climate is more than temperate enough to sustain a variety of palm species that can make your home look far removed from—and far more exotic—than the Texas Gulf Coast Plain.
If you own a contemporary style home, another option for a luxury front yard landscape would be a swimming pool in the front of the house. Abandon the fixed idea that a pool has to always be constructed in the back yard. Some of the most magnificent swimming pools in the world have been built in front of homes. Obviously, as in the case of the previous example of Mediterranean style homes, you need sufficient yard space in the front to support a custom modern pool design. Provided you have enough area for us to work in, any number of eclectic geometric forms can be cut out of the landscape that will make your pool a mirror of your contemporary home.
If you own a traditional multi-storied home, the most important thing a luxury front yard landscape can do is to magnify viewer’s focus on the façade. Traditional homes are frequently built with large, stately columns. The vertical impact of the columns should e supported by landscape elements that accordingly rise up from the terrain to complement their upward movement. However, you do not want anything too tall in front of the home that might detract from its presentation.
A formal garden is a good way to balance these two demands. Installed between the street and the front door of the home, it has just enough vertical impact to draw the eye upward along the linear movements of the columns and to focus attention on the architectural nuances of windows, upper balconies, and the roof. However, a garden alone only makes the home look pretty; it does not by itself create what we could technically call a luxury front yard landscape.
In order to do this, we have to contain the growth of vegetation with geometric hardscapes that invite the viewer to enter the garden and ultimately pass through its interior to the front door of the home. A variety of walkway designs and terraces can be created to convey this feeling of being pulled toward the house. These, in turn, can be softened with urns, flower pots, island gardens, and unique custom fountain designs that employ the mystique of water to unite architecture, hardscape, and vegetation.
