If you have a well-designed front porch, people will likely envy you for how charming and attractive it is. Plus, it will probably give off good vibes. If there is no design, porches can look bad. Yikes! As with anything, there’s no free lunch. If you have a porch, you are responsible for making sure it looks good, is inviting, and is functional.

Good news: This is easy to do, and it does not have to cost much. Porches are a great place to start for aspiring DIY-ers since they don’t require any digging or construction. There are many factors to consider when choosing how to best design a porch, as every porch is different. No ready-made formula exists. Porch design is not difficult, it is similar to taking on any other landscape design project.

Goals for Front Porch Design

What do you want from your porch?

Attractive

There are three audiences for your porch: the market, the neighbors, and you. Porches that are visible from the street have a big influence on a home’s curb appeal. If you want to attract homebuyers, it is better to have a porch than not. Porches are something that people desire. Making your porch look good from the street will make your house more appealing to buyers, and is therefore a good investment.

Neighbors are generally worried about how the condition of neighboring properties could affect the value of their own homes. Therefore, they usually prefer to live on a street where all the houses have well-maintained yards.

Projecting a sense of style, tidiness, and intentionality to the neighborhood is just as important as having a well-designed porch and yard.

You deserve to be happy with how your home looks. Designing a porch to suit a homeowner’s personal style is more important than worrying about the market and the neighbors.

• Functional
  Porches are viable outdoor spaces, available to use for a range of functions. Provided the intended use will meet the aesthetic bar for being on display to the neighborhood, porches are ready to take on anything they can physically fit: dining, cocktails, play zones, gardening, flexible social space… you name it.
• Enjoyment
  Porches bring all sorts of pleasant things to mind: rocking chairs, mint juleps, neighborly hellos, evenings with rambunctious kiddos, stolen moments of tranquility. These are places to enjoy yourself. Porch design should put a premium on creating a space ripe for such enjoyment.

Goal-Driven Porch Design

How can porch design achieve these broad goals?

Designers need to be able to see both the big picture and the smaller details.

Big Picture:

The porch is the area where the house and the yard meet. It is a style that is between interior and exterior design sensibilities.

Porches play an important role in making architectural and landscape elements work together. If you want your house to have curb appeal, you need to make sure that all of the design elements work together cohesively.

To be successful, you need to make different choices for each project, but you can improve your chances by using the same type of plants and materials.

Choose colors, textures, and materials for your porch and home exterior that match or complement the ones you used in your yard. Adding plants to your porch that have similar textures, habits, and colors as the plants in your yard will give your porch a cohesive look. The goal is not to have everything match, but to create a very obvious and harmonious dialogue between design elements across the landscape, porch, and home.

Little Things:

If you want to achieve harmony in your life, you need to pay attention to the details. How a design handles individual elements has a major influence on a porch’s overall appearance, feel, and usefulness as its own separate space. In addition to dictating the style of the porch, the details of the design also play a role in how well the porch, house, and landscape work together as a cohesive design.

Front Porch Features and Design Ideas

Front Door

Front doors are a natural focal point. They also get a lot of use. There is a strong argument to be made for using design elements to highlight front doors. Placing container plants on one or both sides of an entryway is a good way to build cohesiveness and create visual interest. Perhaps the plants resemble the lower yard. The containers may be a concrete color that reminds people of the paving stones in their yard. You can also play with material and color. Choose a wood tone for your trim that will echo the furnishing or other design features in your home, or you can go with a bolder color that will still complement the color of your house while also alluding to the perennials that bloom in your landscape. You can use porch design details to give other areas of your yard the same look and feel. The goal should be to have a subtle link between design zones rather than an obvious one.

Windows

Consider both the indoor and outdoor experience when designing around windows. Windows are best left unobstructed from the indoors to allow daylight in and give people a clear view of the outside world.

From the street, it is better to respond to windows than to ignore them. Plants can be used to frame windows, and furniture can be arranged near windows to create a clean and visually appealing pattern. You can’t avoid paying attention to windows because they’re so noticeable. Again, the main goal is to express a deliberate relationship between elements on the porch and the home (i.e. the window). There doesn’t need to be a perfect alignment between the window and porch elements, but they should feel like they were placed there intentionally. If possible, elements like new trees in the lower yard should be aligned with exterior windows. In this scenario, the porch should be designed to be unobtrusive, with the focus being on the lower yard.

Railings and Stairs

Boundaries heavily influence the way spaces feel. Spaces that are enclosed by large, solid walls feel more isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, and have less air circulation. From the outside, they discourage approach. Spaces with well-defined boundaries feel more separated from their surroundings. Viewed from outside, they feel welcoming. Openness and interconnectivity are usually desirable in landscape design. This technique is especially helpful in making small front yards look bigger, or in conveying a modern design sensibility.

The edges of most porches are bordered by railings or stairs. Guardrails are often required for elevated porches above 30″, while lower porches may have the option to use or skip them. Avoiding guard rails on wide stairs is a design trick that is often used on decks. However, this same trick does not always look right when it is adapted to porches.

Awesome Front Yard Landscaping Ideas For Instant Curb Appeal

1. Pre-Formed Beds Are Quick and Affordable

If you add pre-formed raised beds to your garden, you won’t have to spend as much time getting rid of weeds, and it will also make your front yard look more interesting.

You only need to spend a little time setting up the garden sets. Fill a pot or container with soil and plant the chosen flowers.

2. Use Desert Grasses in Place of Cactus

This modern home’s clean, minimalist lines set the stage for an aesthetically pleasing front yard landscape. The unusual plants and decorative grasses create a continuous flow of tufts with the effect of randomly appearing desert flowers.

3. Cascade Flowers Over Flower Beds

One way to make your front yard look nicer and increase your home’s curb appeal is to plant a flower garden. The blooms can be a mixture of annual and perennial flowers, coming in a variety of colors.

Arrange your plants by height to create a cascading look, and use the variety of textures and colors to enjoy the natural beauty of a living carpet. If you want to enjoy your front yard landscaping idea all year round, it is a good idea to plant evergreen shrubs.

4. Tree Surrounded With Shade-Loving Annuals

An area with a shady tree and perennials would make a great focal point. shade-friendly plants for your front yard landscaping include begonias, touch-me-nots, alyssum, and pansies.

If you want a garden bed that is well designed and has a good structure, use pavers or stones to mark out its boundaries and to make it easier to mow around.

5. Boxwood Walkway Adds Classic Appeal

You should keep your walkway leading to the front door in good condition. You can further enhance your home’s entryway by adding garden beds on either side to create a natural corridor leading to the inside of your home.

6. Zen Garden With White Gravel and Globes

A little bit of zen in the backyard is never a bad thing. The zen outdoor arrangement adds to the relaxing vibe and gives the yard a moderate exotic look.

The typical features of a Zen garden are usually stones, water features, and a minimum of plants. The example features large concrete globes positioned on a gravel-covered bed. To make the front yard landscape match the existing green areas, evergreen bushes or ornamental grasses are planted in the gravel.

7. Trellises Bring Plain Walls to Life

Climbing plants are great for creating a living screen or vertical shade. There is one more application- that of masking means. You can use vines to hide an ugly or unfinished wall or fence.

8. Fill Garden Beds With Hosta and Coleus

Instead of blooming flowers, you could try a coleus plant. The leaf foliage of perennials and annuals usually fades quickly, but the colorful leaf foliage lasts longer and is more interesting.

There are many different types of coleus, making them a great plant to use to create a sustainable front yard landscape. The coleus is often planted with hostas because it is shade resistant.

9. Build Your Patio Around a Small Garden

The landscaping idea doesn’t have to take up a lot of space. Instead, it can be smaller but impressive and effective.

This will also reduce the amount of time spent outdoors watering the plants. This elegant example has a square of land separated from the stone paving by bricks. A raised bed is formed with different kinds of shrubs and plants that are growing together densely to create a symmetric focal point that has multiple layers.

10. Wheelbarrow Planter Adds Cottage Style Charm

If you are looking for a way to improve your front-yard landscaping, try repurposing a non-functional wheelbarrow into a planter.

The worn look of the wooden handles and rusty wheel is immediately eye-catching. s Consider planting flowers that will bloom during different seasons, such as petunias, fuschias, and pelargoniums. This will create a more varied and interesting look.

11. Desert Homes Call for Hardscaping and Succulents

If you are living in a draught and hot region, there is still a way to create a front yard that improves the curb appeal of your home. Varieties like cactus, ornamental grass, palms are friendly to the extreme zones.

12. Add LED Lighting to Garden Edging

Use lighting to make the front yard appealing at night. These lanterns are a great way to light up your garden, and they’re very affordable. In addition to using external lights, you can also use built-in lights to create a modern look in your yard.

Rope lights are a budget-friendly light source that can create the built-in look you want. Run your fingers along the string of lights along the edge of your bed and enjoy the relaxing ambiance it creates at night.

13. Evergreens Add Flare Without Fuss

If you don’t have time for an annual and perennial garden, go for evergreen shrubs. They don’t require much maintenance and stay green all year long.

To increase the curb appeal of your home, add features like a birdbath, fountain, or large light source.