At the end of a long driveway near Chancellorsville Battlefield, I drove up to my next Fredericksburg landscaping project. The beautiful brick home positively oozed charm and class. The front landscaping? Not so much.
It’s a nice sized home on a large lot, which is why the planting design just didn’t make sense. Everything was tucked up next to the house, making everything feel smaller than it was. The clients didn’t want to do anything crazy or over the top, but they did want to create a more dramatic approach to the house, and to bring the landscape design in line with the architecture.
One way to make the front of a home feel more expansive is with a courtyard. There was no reason to add a ton of paving, but I felt like it was the right idea. I opted to treat the lawn as the courtyard, with plantings to help define it. Finally, redoing the foundation plantings is what this Fredericksburg landscaping project needed!
One way I wanted to bring the home forward was by adding brick to the landscape. For such a beautiful wooded setting I didn’t want to go overboard, so I opted for a set of flagstone steps out of the entry lawn courtyard, flanked by brick columns. We added custom made precast balls to the column tops to add to the home’s elegance.
In Virginia, brick and boxwood go together like Batman and Robin, so a boxwood hedge works perfectly to give the courtyard feel.
This last photo shows how differently the house appears when you come up the driveway. Everything just feels larger, and more welcoming! Scroll back up and see if you agree.
Click here to see what we did for a Lake Anna landscaping project!