To add classic elegance to your home’s exterior, consider taking inspiration from French gardens. French garden design has a legacy of precise, formal and beautiful landscaping, making it the perfect style for homeowners wanting to dress up their outdoor space.
While a French garden can be more maintenance than other garden styles due to the emphasis on clean edges and pristine shapes, understanding the fundamentals will help you achieve the same aesthetic at home.
To help, here is a basic guide to the key elements of French garden design:
Traditional French gardens highlight the home or residence as the focal point of the landscape. Garden designs typically include pathways directing visitors to the front door, often oriented perpendicular to the facade.
While Stucco and stonework homes are classic French focal points, any style of home can use this same design scheme.
Symmetrical lines are essential to French garden design. When creating pathways, planting or arranging shrubs, it’s crucial to keep everything precise and even on both sides. Boxwood shrubs are a popular way to create symmetry by growing them into easily trimmed hedge rows. Geometric shapes like diamonds, triangles and semicircles are all worth exploring in your design, as long as the overall aesthetic maintains its symmetry.
Water features like stone garden fountains, reflecting pools and carefully manicured ponds are important elements in French gardens. Traditional French garden fountains come in several varieties, including free-standing fountains and fountains built into walls. Multi-tiered and highly ornamental designs are perfect options to incorporate water into your formal French garden.
Formal gardens tend to stick to simple color palettes. Cool colors are especially popular for French style gardens, so when choosing plants or flowers, err on the side of gray, white, blue and purple. Lavender is the traditional choice for French garden style, and easy to grow either in decorative containers or in carefully manicured planting beds.
While these are some key elements of French garden design, they are only guidelines to inspire you. Using this design scheme, you can add custom creativity and create a French style garden all your own.
In twenty five years of real estate sales and marketing experience, I have sold hundreds of properties, while developing detailed knowledge of Sonoma & Napa area communities. I am a life-long resident in the North Bay and after a full day at work, I enjoy spending time with my four children, and participating in their many school and recreational activities.
Over the years, my clients have expressed diverse plans and dreams. I seek to truly understand and appreciate my clients' goals, focusing my efforts on realizing them. It has been fun learning more about the unique opportunities that attract people to the area such as the culinary community, the viticulture and wine industry as well as outdoor adventure tourism. It is important to me to listen to my clients, do what it takes to serve their needs and I am dedicated to treating everyone involved in a transaction both in a personal and professional manner. I work hard to anticipate and respond to the routine tasks at hand as well as the complex challenges that come up during real estate transactions while ensuring my goal to deliver you the outcome you desire.