No matter the design of your home, the landscape is what often sets a property apart from all its neighbors. Adding beauty and function to your landscape will make your home more comfortable and improve everyone’s outdoor experiences. Large outdoor spaces give you room to spread out but they can lack cohesiveness or intentionality like small spaces. Let your landscape speak for your home: here are five landscape design ideas to make your large outdoor space more functional in Trenton, MI.
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Define Spaces with Structures
The functionality of your outdoor living space will be defined by the various structures that bring creature comforts to the great outdoors. A pergola, for instance, can provide a relaxing environment around a pool or the edge of a patio with its shade. An outdoor kitchen and bar can become the base for cocktail parties and lavish feasts with friends and family. A fire pit can be the most important feature that entices people to relax in your outdoor living space, providing warmth and light that can’t help but draw people to it. Let these different structures create some cohesiveness and intention in your landscape.
Install a Seat Wall
One of the best masonry structures you can add to a landscape is a seat wall that adjoins your outdoor living space. It can partially or completely encircle the patio to make it feel cozier, separate the pool deck from the rest of the backyard, or line the edge of a walkway and provide a great place to sit and enjoy the scenery. A seat wall can be a simple bench that provides room for a few people to sit and chat; and yet, this structure can be an important design element. You could even integrate landscape lighting fixtures into the seat wall to add ambient light and safely light walking surfaces without the visual clutter of stand-alone light fixtures.
Break Up the Monotony
A flat and even outdoor living space can have some advantages, but it’s often difficult to make such a space interesting while maintaining functionality. Instead of a fully flat surface, consider breaking up the horizontal plane with a set of terraced platforms. Each of these platforms can constitute a miniature patio with a specific purpose, such as relaxing underneath a pergola, dining next to an outdoor kitchen, or getting warm by the fire pit. The resulting differences in elevation will create a varied and interesting outdoor living space that still feels cohesive and thoughtfully designed.
Downsize Your Lawn
The front yard is a perfect area to let a lawn shine and adorn your home. The backyard, however, should be a multi-use space and for many people (anyone without kids or pets), big lawns just aren’t very functional. Consider downsizing the lawn in your backyard and using the extra area to increase the space you actually use: your outdoor living space. You could take the mini terraced patio idea and expand the concept, placing several smaller patios throughout the landscape and letting the green spaces or other landscape features in between create closeness with nature and a sense of enclosure in each space.
Plan for Foot Traffic
The outdoor living space immediately next to the home is often the most used area of your backyard. It should have the most important aspects of outdoor living. Typically, the outdoor kitchen is located close to the home because of the high amount of foot traffic. This is where all the parties will happen. Quieter spaces such as a fireside area or reading nook should be placed further out in the landscape to take advantage of seclusion and stay out of the main flow of traffic.
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