Personalize your Custom Home with a Stunning Outdoor Space
The most opportune time to create a custom landscape design is, of course, when you’re building a custom home! Modern landscape design is becoming increasingly popular, particularly among those who have a clean slate to create it with. The land has been prepped and it’s a blank canvas, all ready for your ideas.
Many homeowners like to match the landscaping with the style and architecture of their new house. As a custom home builder, we can work alongside your chosen landscaper to design a concept for your property. Together, we can tweak and adjust features of your home to flow beautifully with your garden design. We can also help you choose design features that will help to add to your property value in the long term.
Whether you want to work with a subcontractor to develop your green space or prefer to do it yourself, we can ensure that you have the irrigation, infrastructure, expert advice and anything else you’ll need to incorporate all of your ideas for your property and custom home design.
Whether that means a backyard pool, a retaining wall that doubles as a raised garden bed, moving a door over a few inches to match perfectly with a walkway, or just about anything else, we’ll be by your side to ensure that the outdoor space looks and feels just as amazing as the house itself.
What Are Some Types of Modern Landscape Design?
Modern doesn’t have to mean cold or stale. The idea behind modern landscaping is to create a sense of order and structure, while incorporating plants and decor to reflect your home’s style and your personality. Inject colour with low-maintenance perennials, install vertical planters to accentuate the clean lines of your home’s design, or go all out and create a designation vacation space right in your own backyard.
Xeriscaping
Ideal for those who are passionate about conservation and developing a net-zero home, xeriscaping is sustainable landscaping. It’s a perfect way to add edgy style to your landscape without having to worry about watering a lawn or weeding a flower bed.
Also called xeroscaping, xeriscaping is done with the use of beautiful rocks, stonework, gravel, and drought-tolerant plants which come together to provide an effortless natural beauty. Many xeriscapers love to use plants like lavender, since they fill in areas nicely with spears of tiny purple blooms, attracting pollinators like bees and butterflies.
West Coast Seeds has a great blog post all about xeriscaping and the types of plants that work best here on Vancouver Island for our wet winters and hot, dry summers.
Stone Gardens
Made up almost completely of anything stone, from dramatic sculptures to eye-catching rock varieties, stone gardens are an excellent way to create curb appeal with zero maintenance. These types of gardens work particularly well as the foreground for a very modern-looking home created with a lot of straight edges and parallel lines.
A skilled landscape designer will be able to create complementary landscaping for your custom home. Easy-care plantings, usually in large containers, can be mixed within stone gardens to create symmetry. This way, flowers and grasses like bamboo can be incorporated without the worry about them spreading through the rock beds. The goal here is to create angular, geometric patterns that complement the modern design of the house. Green accents like cropped turf will complement the rock garden nicely while still being extremely low maintenance.
Water Gardens and Pools
Always a gorgeous feature for any home, water gardens can be as small or as grand as you like. Stocked with koi and water lilies, they function as a conversation piece as much as your own little piece of paradise. If you know that you’d like a pond to be developed in your front yard or back yard (be sure to check local development guidelines first) we can help to ensure that the site is properly prepared and plumbed. If your property has low-lying areas or a seasonal creek, you can also have this developed to be a year-round water feature.
Another option, which will likely make you the most popular house on the block, is to add an in-ground pool. Whether or not you’d like a pool should be decided early on in the home design process to ensure the infrastructure and space is available to meet your vision.
Picture a stone surround, a big pool deck for entertaining, a swim-up bar if you want to get really fancy… Depending on the space available, your budget and your vision, you could have a real showstopper without worrying about having any grass to mow. Combined with a patio and an outdoor kitchen, you’ll want to spend every evening in your beautiful backyard.
Edible Gardens
An offshoot of the traditional vegetable garden is the edible garden. The traditional vegetable garden beds can end up looking unruly, which is the opposite of what you want when it comes to modern landscaping (which should change little in appearance throughout the year).
To match your modern style custom home, you could create your edible garden a few different ways. You could place contemporary containers with a minimalist profile in strategic locations to keep your herbs and greens contained. Plant kale and chard in tall, angular containers, let cherry tomatoes flourish in a tall container of their own, plant garlic and chives in another.
Really, it’s all about what you will eat and what will add to the look and feel of your modern garden to create lush landscaping without it feeling cluttered. Pathways are ideal here, with square or rectangular stepping-stones to create that geometric pattern that plays off of the home’s lines. You could even place dwarf fruit trees among tightly clipped shrubberies. These will provide food and shade while maintaining the static shape and feel of the garden.
Here on Vancouver Island, we have such a temperate climate which lends itself well to growing so many different varieties of fruits and vegetables. Many gardeners take advantage of our climate but also recognize that our summers are becoming drier and hotter, and there is a need for water conservation.
With a great landscaper and horticulturalist by your side, your modern landscape can be designed to perfectly complement and blend with your custom home. Whether you dream of a sculptural creek, a garden laden with hidden fruits and vegetables, or a zero-maintenance rockery, you’re sure to find the right fit for your LIDA custom home. For ideas, view our showcase of previous custom homes.
Modern landscapes are part of the fun when it comes to creating your place to call home. At LIDA Construction, we are passionate about eco-friendly and net zero home design. Our team of expert designers will be happy to help connect you with reputable Victoria-based landscape designers to take the next step on your custom home journey. Join the ranks of our many happy clients and contact our friendly team today at (778) 440-5432 or send an email to get started.