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Wow, for second I thought you bought a house we had looked at a couple of years ago! I think what is bugging you is lack of color. The house is kind of lost in the landscaping because you basically have two colors going, brown and green. Tearing out the landscaping will only make the house look bare and sterile. Painting the gable and trim around the windows will do wonders. I have seen homes like this where the owners have went with a clay color and it gave the house a more modern feel. Clay and dark brown look nice together.
Another route is going rustic. There is an adorable house not too far from me just like this 70's ranch, where they painted the house a barn red color. They painted the windows and the trim the red color. With the heavy greenery (like this house you are considering) makes it look so charming. Like a cute getaway nestled in the trees. The contrast of the barn red and dark brown brick really pop. Adding some flowers will help as well.
Last edited by fallingwater; 08-08-2011 at 08:04 AM..
Reason: odd wording
I thought about painting those, too. What color is a "more modern" color? Also, what are yur feelings on that vinyl shake siding that looks so real for the gables? (That way it'd be maintenance-free. Of course that would cost more, too!)
I'd go with hardie board instead of vinyl, but then I just hate vinyl siding. As for colors, just go to the paint store and pull a whole bunch of sample colors. It can get hard to get something to complement the tones of the brick, and you can't really tell until you've got the color right next to it.
I bet if you took 5 pots of red geraniums in full bloom and mixed them in with the bushes there and took another picture you would see the house in a whole new light.
The issues I see here are mostly of color and scale.
It should be relatively easy to go many shades lighter on the trim / siding and still have things that compliment the brick -- toffee, mocha, chamois and 'baseball glove' are all directions that you could explore for paint.
Scale is trickier. The decision to have a BIG vacant lawn and shrubs bunch too close to the house make the wide front lawn un-welcoming. If you have a moderate fall climate coming up you MIGHT be able to do the hard work of using a combination of power equipment and careful hand digging to take what appear to be mostly health shrubs and redistribute them much more artfully around the front so that you can create more variation in DEPTH with some of the shrubbery anchoring planting beds of colored flowers, others anchoring green "ground cover", some just interrupting the lawn and some still close to the house.
Ideally you could work in some kind of a hardscape PATHWAY that makes the FRONT DOOR more approachable but even some well-mulched "trails" that lead the eyes from the curb to the home would be a HUGE improvement.
It is not easy to find a landscape designer /architect that has an incentive to keep / reuse as much of the plant material as you already have as many work with firms that make money selling a whole bunch of new plants, so you might want to track down someone that has a more "reuse / recycle" kind of mindset and maybe some one that bills by the hour instead of the total cost of the project...
I have seen some "make overs" that re-use most of the plants and have sections of the wide lawn interspersed with more up-to-date prairie grasses / bamboo that along with an updated paint palette are amazingly transformative of "middle aged" ranch homes like this.
I think it's nice as is! I wouldn't do anything right away. I'd live there for a year and think about it. Possibly paint the wood a lighter color? Maybe replace the bushes over time? I'd leave the trees alone though. They look beautiful.
That's a cute house and the only real problem as far as curb appeal that I see is that the front door is not readily identifiable. I wouldn't add vinyl siding (NO NO!), but I do think that painting the gables and trim a dark mushroom color (with the trim being a shade or two even darker than the gable) would make the brick pop. I like the idea of adding flower beds around the tree, but if you made a stone walkway (lined with plantings) that leads up to the front door, so it really stands out from the street, and add a couple of freestanding planters to either side of the door - the house will look stunning.
I really like it. It looks very well taken care of. Maybe just trim the bushes. Hope you don't kill any trees. I don't even object to the paint, but if you want to repaint, look at the brick and pick a color in the brick . . .
I would also plant some flowers and plant some thing at the edge of the grass . . .don't know what the style of the neighborhood is, re: fences or borders . . . It needs some visual interest . . .
Also, WHERE is the front door? I do not see it and I don't see a path to the door. You need that. If you are going to add a path, do not add a straight line path, but something with curves. The front door should be painted a glossy black and the entrance should be well-lit.
The front door is behind the blue spruce bush. :-) You're right, it's hard to see! There is a nice sidewalk, but it's not visible from the front. I like the idea of another (curving) path to it from the road. I picture something wide and welcoming with plantings on the sides of it. Great ideas everyone! Thanks!
The front door is behind the blue spruce bush. :-) You're right, it's hard to see! There is a nice sidewalk, but it's not visible from the front. I like the idea of another (curving) path to it from the road. I picture something wide and welcoming with plantings on the sides of it. Great ideas everyone! Thanks!
Do you have a Photoshop program you could use to doctor up the picture some--put some "flowers" up front, 'put in" the sidewalk?
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