5 Ways to Align Masonry Projects With the Home in Blairstown and Branchville, NJ, Areas
Creating a cohesive landscape design that both incorporates natural stone and other natural materials and harmonizes with the style of the home can be a challenge, but it’s also an enjoyable process. Here are fiveways masonry projects can align with a home in the Blairstown and Branchville, NJ, areas.
Related: 4 Roles Masonry Plays in Landscape Design in the Hope, NJ, Area
Choosing the Right Materials
An obvious way to align landscape masonry with the home is to use the same or similar materials on vertical features. For example, if your home features an outdoor fireplace, the same type of stone could be used for constructing retaining walls, pillars, or water features.
If your home has an exposed foundation, this presents an opportunity to add style to the home while creating a thoughtfully designed outdoor living space. The outcome could result in both the home and outdoor areas appearing as if they were designed and built at the same time.
Bringing Out the Best Colors
Using similar or complementary colors can unify the theme between home and landscape as well. If your home features classic red brick siding, for example, you can carry the warmth over to a reddish flagstone patio. This approach works particularly well because flagstone patios typically feature larger stone slabs, which beautifully contrast against the small scale of the bricks.
For varied colors, river rock can introduce light tones in a small amount of space and can help tie in the colors that appear in landscape features made of natural stone. Light or neutral colors embrace the differences in natural materials while subtly uniting them.
Looking for Patterns
Aligning particularly striking patterns—even using different materials—can bring harmony to your outdoor living areas. For example, a stacked fieldstone wall with its narrow layers can echo the linear quality of brick siding or even wood siding.
Making the Most of Scale
A large home can be balanced by the construction of a retaining wall made of larger stone or an oversized fire pit. Consider the height of the home as well as the footprint and how the features in the landscape can complement that heft and achieve their right to attention. Harmonizing the home with outdoor features could mean that your focus is more vertically oriented if the home is two or even three stories (such as on a sloped lot with a walkout basement). Other ideas include echoing an arched window with a curved retaining wall or reflecting the expanse of a wide covered porch with a wide outdoor fireplace.
Breaking the Rules
All rules exist for a reason, but they can often be bent or broken. A single-story, ranch-style home, for example, doesn’t have to be surrounded by long and low stone walls. An amazing look could be achieved by nudging the eye upward to add dimension to avoid the sensation that the landscape is too “flat.”
There is sometimes the assumption that large spaces should have large elements, and small spaces should have small elements. In reality, filling a smaller space with carefully chosen larger elements can make the space feel larger. A small flagstone patio, surrounded by a natural-feeling arrangement of boulders, and featuring a large outdoor fireplace and stone seat wall, can provide the elements of comfort without the need for decorative touches that could make the space feel busy and tight.