Homescaping: Matching the landscape with the house

It was a cold and snowy winter, but now it’s finally time to start thinking about doing some new spring landscaping or maybe just some sprucing up.

Here’s a different way to think about your landscape. Instead of beginning with abstract design principles and applying them to your property, think about how you use the space outside your home and aim to create settings for those activities.

Just as you would decorate the rooms inside your house, you can design outdoor spaces for dining and entertaining, reading and relaxing, enjoying sports or games, (for kids and grown-ups) or exercising pets.

When you set about creating or reworking your outdoor living space, think about working outward from the house, extending the decorative style and the colors of the house outdoors. When you take that approach, the indoor and outdoor spaces will flow into one another in a seamless, unified whole.

Getting Started

Start with the basics: your landscaping needs to accommodate your lifestyle and the kinds of things you do outdoors. So plan for a lawn if you need it, beds and borders of flowers, shrubs, and/or ornamental grasses where they make sense, and paths and walkways that will let you get more easily from one place to another. When the practical issues are settled, coordinating your garden with the house—in terms of both style and color—will give your property an integrated, harmonious look.

Find the Right Style

When the style of your landscape suits the architectural style of your home, house and grounds will work together. The simplest way to get a handle on garden styles is to sort them into three broad categories: formal, informal and naturalistic. Step one in matching garden to house is to consider the style of the house.

Formal Style

If yours is a colonial or federal style, or Italianate, Greek revival, Queen Anne, Georgian or a French chateau, a formal garden will coordinate beautifully. Formal gardens are clean and balanced, with straight paths and design axes that usually line up visually with the house and important features in the landscape. Garden beds are neatly defined geometric shapes that are symmetrically arranged—rectangles, squares, circles or triangles.

Plants in formal gardens are all neatly maintained. This is the place for meticulously sheared hedges, carefully clipped shrubs and topiary cones, globes, boxes and spirals. A simple, restrained color scheme—blue and white, for example—works well in a formal garden.

Formal gardens can also be bold and contemporary with dramatic, sculptural plants. But because they are so balanced in composition, they are generally peaceful, serene places. A formal garden need not be stuffy or boring. It can be restful to the eye and spirit.

In a formal landscape, enhance the look by using formal surfaces for paths, patios and walls. Cut bluestone or limestone, mortared brick or stone pavers laid in careful patterns or a wrought iron gate will all continue the formal style of the property.

Complete the look with formal accessories: ensconce potted plants in classic urns, elegant stone or ceramic jars (be sure to key their colors to the house); fiberglass pots that look like cast iron or stone; or painted wood boxes. For a contemporary home, seek out angular, flat-sided containers of zinc, ceramic, or fiberglass for a minimalist look.

Informal Style

Informal gardens are full of visual movement and are built on graceful curves and dynamic diagonals 
rather than crisp, straight lines. Informal garden beds often have 
curved edges and they seem to flow across the landscape as paths wind and meander.

The plants in an informal landscape are looser—trees and shrubs are allowed to assume their natural forms, with minimal pruning, as they billow and fountain. Perennial and annual flowers are grouped into flowing drifts that may intermingle along the edges. The plants spill onto pathways and lean into one another.

If your house is a bungalow, saltbox, cottage, ranch, log home, wood-shingle, post-modern or farmhouse, it will probably be well served by an informal garden.

For pavement in an informal landscape, consider random-sized flagstone, stepping stones, pebbles or crushed stone, dry-laid brick or perhaps textured concrete. Divide space or define boundaries with a stacked-stone wall, or a picket, post-and-rail, board-on-board or lattice panel fence. Use casual looking containers on your deck or patio. There are terra-cotta pots in many sizes and shapes, hand-thrown ceramic pots, bowls and olive jars, natural wood planters and boxes, even re-purposed found objects that can complete the look.

If a formal garden feels too constrained for your taste, but an informal style seems too loose, you might like a hybrid of the two. Make the underlying structure of the landscape formal, with neatly shaped beds and straight paths, then plant loosely within those beds, allowing plants to soften some of the sharp edges.

Naturalistic Landscapes

A third landscape style, the naturalistic garden, evokes the feeling and look of a place in nature—a woodland or meadow, for instance. A naturalistic design can echo the natural 
surroundings of your house. Go for a beachy look if you’re near the water, or aim toward a woodland if your house is on a shady, tree-filled lot. A meadow garden can be delightful in an open, sunny location.

Interestingly, many contemporary houses look terrific with naturalistic gardens, though it’s not necessarily the style that would first come to mind.

For paths in a naturalistic landscape, use natural materials—wood rounds sliced from a log, perhaps, or fieldstone stepping stones set deep enough that the top surface is at ground level. Or surface a path with mulch (just be prepared to replace it every year or two). Put plants in twig baskets, rustic wood planters or stone troughs.

Color Match

There are lots of ways to work with color in the garden and all sorts of possible color schemes. It practically goes without saying that you will want to use colors you like to look at. Keying colors in your garden to the colors of your house can tie the landscape to the house.

To devise a color scheme for your garden, look first at the walls of the house and choose garden colors to harmonize with them or to contrast pleasingly.

For example, if your walls are brick, or red-painted siding, then sunset colors of golden yellows, oranges and reds would harmonize beautifully with the house. Warm colored flowers are also lovely with beige walls—warm pinks or orangey reds, red-violets, or even rich purples, complement beige or tan. If your house is gray, it’s a coolly neutral backdrop. Cool colors—purples, blues and cool pinks, or deep burgundy or rich carmine red work beautifully with gray. Or warm up the landscape with brilliant orange or soft apricot tones in the garden.

In addition to harmonizing garden colors with the actual walls—and don’t forget the roof!—of your house, you can also echo trim colors on the 
house in garden flowers or architectural elements in the landscape. Pick up the color of your front door or shutters in a pot of flowers on the front steps, or in a gate or fence, or a gazing globe or 
birdhouse out in the garden. Echo a color from the house in an arbor or gazebo.

You can even extend your indoor color scheme into outdoor furnishings on your deck or patio so your indoor space visually flows into your outdoor space. Match the colors of outdoor pillows and tablecloths, art and ornaments, pots and planters (and the flowers you grow in them) to the colors you’ve used inside your house.

Thoughtful landscaping will pull your property together and create a well-integrated design view. Your house will look at home in its setting, you’ll feel comfortable there and your property value will be enhanced. The key to making the match is to choose plants, structures and accessories that relate to the style and color of your house, and to coordinate all the parts of your outdoor space.