The title image features Beacon Hill Smooth patio pavers.
A beautifully designed landscape blends natural and the man-made elements, provides seamless transitions from the indoors to the outdoors, and harmonizes your home life with the surroundings. Choosing the right pavers for your driveway, patio, walkway, and pool deck can make all the difference. Here’s how pavers determine the aesthetic theme of a landscape design in Newark, NJ.
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Be Inspired By Your Surroundings
Take design cues from the home as well as its surroundings. What are the dominant colors? What color temperatures (cool or warm) are around you? Are there any materials either on the home or within the landscape, such as stone outcrops or siding, that you want to carry through your new hardscape areas?
The home serves as a clean palette, in the sense that you can use pavers to mimic its architectural style, or transform it into something different.
Contemporary homes are often a mix of architectural styles, so it can be hard to choose pavers according to the aesthetic of the home. You could instead let the pavers you’re drawn to determine the aesthetic theme.
A grand, brick-sided home can seem very formal, but if you want to tone down the formality and introduce a relaxed vibe, you can do so using tumbled pavers such as Brussels Block. Choose from Limestone, New York Blend, Sierra, Almond Grove, and Sandstone to achieve a complementary hardscape that gives your outdoor living space exactly the atmosphere you’re seeking.
A traditional Dutch Colonial home (a style very popular in the 1970s) can be modernized using large-format pavers in beautiful blended colors. A great choice is the Unilock Beacon Hill Smooth paver in the XL rectangle (21¼” x 35½”), which will mimic the shape of the home’s brick siding, yet offer a fresh and uncluttered look on your patio. The six colors (New York Blend, Tuscany, Almond Grove, Sierra, Steel Mountain, and Fossil) are perfect for adding a modern, sophisticated appeal to your patio, walkway, or pool deck.
Choosing Complementary Styles to the Home
You can make a modern home feel more down to earth and casual by choosing rustic-textured pavers such as Richcliff, which gives you an incredibly realistic flagstone appeal. Use the Pebble Taupe, Smoke Shale, or Dawn Mist colors separately, or blend them together on site to create truly one-of-a-kind outdoor living spaces. These pavers are created using Reala technology, which takes casts from various real flagstones to ensure a random appearance. The small rectangle can be used for driveways if you want to carry the gorgeous look of bluestone throughout your landscape.
Add romance and nostalgia to any home using Mattoni pavers with a Courtstone border. The small shape of these two pavers make them ideal for curved applications like walkways, or to create intimate and interesting patios. The slender shape and distressed surface of Mattoni pavers are inspired by Roman brick, but the Sable, Cocoa Brown, and Dark Charcoal colors are anything but the typical brick red. Finish the look with a border made with the polished well-worn look of Courtstone cobblestone-style pavers in Pebble Taupe, Dawn Mist, Belgian Blue, or Basalt to bring back warm memories of yesteryear.
One of the elements that really determine the aesthetic of your outdoor space is the use of borders. For a dramatic and more formal look, you could go with contrasting borders using not only contrasting colors, but finishes and textures. For a sophisticated, understated look, choose borders that are either the same color as the field pavers, or a shade or two lighter or darker.
If you still feel undecided, you can get inspired on the Unilock Dream page, which is filled with inspiring photos of the many ways to use Unilock pavers to create beautiful, functional, and personal outdoor spaces.
