Stunning curb appeal is an aspiration for many homeowners, whether it be to express their love of their home or to attract potential buyers. Unfortunately, too often the aesthetic qualities of a front yard are not backed by function and practicality. Here’s how to get both visual and practical benefits from your front yard design:
Elegant Natural Stone Steps
Natural features can add authenticity and individuality to your front yard design. But be sure to get your natural stone from a trusted and reliable supplier. Unilock Premium Quality Natural Stone is ethically sourced and specially treated to ensure long-lasting beauty and strength. Unilock Natural Stone is available in Sandstone and Limestone, and offers stunning Natural Edge Step units to create bold and stunning steps in your landscape. These units offer impressive dimensions that remain practical for landscape contractors to install.
The natural edge of Unilock Natural Stone step units can help to inject rich texture into your front yard design and will match the richness and spontaneity of plant beds, foliage and the natural environment.
Stunning Walkways
Walkways provide access to the home from the curb, but they also lead people through the sights and sounds of your landscape, and serve the practical purpose of protecting your lawn and plant beds. A good balance between functional and visual is a walkway that is wide and welcoming, that provides a relaxed path through the yard, but one that does not meander to the point where guests are likely to cut across the softscape to get to the front door.
A Unilock Authorized Contractor can help to design a walkway that suits the architecture of your home, while providing reliability and longevity. For a traditional design, consider a paver such as Town Hall, a paver with the timeless appearance of historic street brick and the strength of up to four times that of poured concrete. Town Hall can be accented to stunning effect with Brussels Block, a Unilock classic.
Related Read: Driveway Pavers with Unique Benefits
A Hidden Patio
To get just that little bit of extra space out of your front yard, why not install a tucked-away patio? A patio that is hidden from the street and out of view of the rest of the front yard can be a welcome sanctuary or a place to enjoy breakfast with a friend. Depending on the layout of your yard, it may also be an excellent spot to catch sun at a time when the rest of your outdoor living space is in shade.
Courtstone pavers present a timeworn cobblestone appearance, which will help add magic to a patio hideaway, and their small, versatile size options make them perfectly suited to round and fan-shaped laying patterns for small, circular patios.
A Driveway with Character
As part of the Unilock Elegance range, Courtstone is also an ideal paver for creating strong, characterful driveways. The Elegance range makes use of a number of cutting-edge concrete technologies to achieve incredible strength, highly-detailed textures, and stunning, long-lasting colors. Included with Courtstone in this exceptional range of pavers are Town Hall, Richcliff and Copthorne. Copthorne presents a similar appearance to Town Hall with its realistic, historical street brick aesthetic, but offers a slightly smaller size. Richcliff, on the other hand, presents the authentic appearance of cut flagstone. Any one or more of these pavers in combination is ideal for creating a gorgeous driveway with character.
Related Read: Retaining Wall Designs That Look Just Like Natural Stone
Add Structure with Retaining Walls
If your front yard is sloped, or contains difficult, uneven ground, a retaining wall system may be necessary to help reshape the topography and create a more structurally and visually organized front yard. The type of wall unit used for this will depend on both the aesthetic requirements of the wall, as well as the load that it will have to bear. For example, the U-Cara Multi-Face Wall System is an excellent wall unit for matching to a modern landscape theme, and can be used to create stunning multi-level terraces that can help to manage stormwater runoff and drainage, and create a layered look for your landscape.
The U-Cara Multi-Face Wall System consists primarily of two parts: Sure Track backer blocks for dimensional accuracy and maintaining structural integrity, and fascia panels for creating an aesthetically pleasing and versatile facade. The U-Cara Multi-Face Wall System can be matched to a range of design themes depending on the fascia panel that is selected. These fascia panels are available in a range of colors, finishes and styles, including the Umbriano Finish, Series Finish, Smooth Face and Pitched Face, and colors such as French Grey, Black Granite, Steel Mountain and Tuscany.
For heavier loads, and a split and weathered surface texture, consider Concord Wall. Concord Wall offers an impressive design with extreme structural stability, and a unique setback design to automatically adjust to form the correct slope. Concord Wall can be used to hold back large slopes and correct serious erosion issues.
The title image features a Town Hall driveway and Brussels Block walkway.
