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Your home’s landscape has a major impact on your property’s curb appeal and functionality. With the right residential landscaping ideas, you can increase your home’s value, provide privacy, help manage stormwater runoff, and give your family beautiful areas to relax, play, or entertain.
Whether you’re looking for a total landscape makeover or just want to spruce things up, creating the right residential landscape for your needs and style takes careful planning and expertise.
Ware Landscaping has been helping Naperville’s homeowners create beautiful, long-lasting landscaping for more than 20 years. We have designed gorgeous, functional landscapes for small and large lawns, front and back yards, side yards, courtyards, patios, walkways, pool decks, outdoor dining areas, gardens, and much more.
We love to create designs that are on trend but also timeless. Most importantly, your home should feel like home to you, which means that we customize each design to your specific needs and wishes.
As we have designed countless landscapes for today’s homeowner, we have a wealth of ideas and knowledge about what works in today’s residential landscape design.
Table of Contents
Let’s take a look at 35 of the best residential landscaping ideas that you can implement into your home’s exteriors.
A simple wooden or beautiful wrought iron fence can add charm while also creating a boundary around parts of your yard. If you need a fence for practical reasons, such as privacy or keeping a pet in your yard, you can choose a design that matches your home’s aesthetic and adds to the ambiance of your yard.
Add formal structure with sculpted boxwood spheres, hedges, and topiaries throughout your garden beds and boundaries. It contrasts beautifully with loose, informal plantings.
A partial stone wall that flanks a patio or seating area can define the space in a natural-looking way. It provides a lot of visual interest, as well as a practical division between walkways and gardens.
Lining your front walkway or driveway with a border of flowering shrubs, hedges or perennials creates colorful curb appeal. Hydrangeas and lavender work well for this!
Use earthy green paint colors on fences, structures, and furniture to make them recede into the plantings. If you have any frustrating eyesores that you can’t remove, you can disguise them with colors that blend into your landscaping.
Gravel comes in lots of shapes, sizes, and colors, which makes it a versatile landscaping option for yards, gardens, walkways, and driveways. Gravel provides a great backdrop for lush potted plants and trees.
Add charming window boxes brimming with flowers and trailing greenery to play up your home’s architecture. They instantly boost curb appeal, too!
We always recommend that you choose native plants suited for your climate and environment to create a lush yet low maintenance landscape design. Many native plants are drought-tolerant too.
Using faux plants to create the look of a living plant wall without the maintenance. You can install these plant walls on fences, walls, and more. It’s inexpensive, easy to install and easy to take down, and great for adding a trendy look.
Line your driveway with grasses, big blooming flowers, groundcover, evergreens, shrubs, or other visually appealing plants to soften the hardscape and add colorful interest.
Extend happy hour outdoors by adding a fun outdoor bar, kitchen, or dining area. Whether it’s portable or built-in, you can create a stylist outdoor dining space that is practical and gorgeous. Don’t forget to add great exterior lighting to extend your use of this area in your yard into the evening hours.
Create a designated seating area without grass by installing a platform deck or patio surrounded by hardscape and ornamental plantings. Wooden decks are one option, but so are pavers and tiles!
A pergola offers a gorgeous ornamental focal point while also creating shade and the potential for a seating area or garden. Pergolas can be decked out with exterior lighting to stand out at night, too.
Choose plants, building materials, and features that seamlessly integrate with your home’s existing architecture, style, and setting. This prevents glaring contradictions
Create a dedicated entertainment area with an outdoor games zone on a covered patio with items like pool or foosball tables, dartboards, TVs, or bar game tables.This is such a fun way to turn your backyard into a popular hangout spot for your family and friends.
If you have a woodsy area in your yard, consider building an off-the-grid camping or glamping hideaway! You can add a deck, a yurt, outdoor furnishings, and all of the creature comforts – all while home is just a stone’s throw away! What a great way to escape from it all while staying comfortable.
Even just a small water fountain, pond, or waterfall feature can add both visual and auditory interest! Placing these near seating areas creates a more relaxing environment. Placing them farther away from lots of activity turns them into a delightful bird and wildlife-attracting feature.
Fig ivy and other vine varieties that attach to surfaces create beautiful canopies overhead when grown on arbors, pergolas, or fences. These are beautiful and shady!
Use strategically placed hedges and screens to delineate different functional areas within your overall landscape, like dining spaces, lounging zones, garden beds, and more.
Carve out a special dining or seating space right in the midst of your garden beds and plantings for an immersive outdoor experience.
Choose trees with unique silhouettes, bark textures, heights, or weeping branches to create living sculpture and drama even in small yards. Just a few different kinds of trees will offer some great contrast.
One of the best ways to make your landscaping unique is to incorporate multi-level patios, decks, and landscaping into your yard’s design for visual interest and expanded usability. If you are lucky enough to have some natural hills, you can take advantage of them with this method!
Garden sheds don’t need to be eyesores! Tuck a cute, customized garden shed into the landscape to stash tools and bring additional character to your green spaces. For the best results, build or buy one that matches the existing design and aesthetic of your home.
It’s a great feeling to gather around a fire pit or chiminea to warm up outdoors on chilly nights. Place it on a patio or natural stone area, and make sure it blends in well with the overall landscape design.
Indulge in an invigorating outdoor shower experience surrounded by the sights and sounds of nature through strategic layout and plant screening. Outdoor showers may not be an option for every home, but if you’re lucky enough to have the space and the privacy, an outdoor shower can be a really cool exterior feature.
Strategically place climbing vines on fences, walls, arbors, or trellises throughout the yard to add vertical greenery and privacy.
An intimate sunken gathering area around a fire pit or fireplace using materials like stone and gravel will give you a perfect place to entertain, socialize, and relax. For a traditional conversation pit look, add curved seating.
In addition to blooming flowers, you can add pops of color in the form of paint, stained glass, pottery, and furniture. This energizes yards and gardens that are a bit too neutral in their coloring.
Create a peaceful zen garden with raked gravel or sand, stone accents, and minimal plantings to evoke an Asian-inspired design.
Go with a traditional English garden by planting roses and classic cottage flowers, plus hedges. This romantic look is always in style.
Add unique sculptural accents like decorative pots, statues, gazing balls, animal topiaries, or garden art for whimsical flair.
A number of fast-growing evergreens (like arborvitae) or hedge-friendly deciduous trees (like American Hornbeam) can be planted close together to form a living screen between you and the rest of the world. Get privacy from your neighbors and the public by creating nature’s fencing.
Many vegetables and herbs work very well in pots and raised beds, which means you can use attractive planters to enjoy growing some of your own food.
Use creative lighting like lanterns, spotlights, and string lights to illuminate your walkways and gardens. This accentuates the landscapes that make your property special.
Choose native plants, efficient irrigation, permeable hardscaping, and recycled materials to increase sustainability and reduce environmental impact.
With these 35 amazing residential landscaping ideas to spark your imagination, you’re probably feeling inspired to create the outdoor oasis of your dreams!
Bring your vision to life by contacting the experienced team at Ware Landscaping today. Whether you need a total yard transformation or just want to add some special touches, the team of landscaping professionals at Ware is ready to make your ideal residential landscape a reality.
Schedule a consultation with Ware Landscaping now to get the conversation started and turn your property into your own private paradise!