Match your garden with your house

By Hosea Omole

Does your garden match your house or does it clash in colour, style and scale? Perhaps you have never considered this question yet the relationship between your house and the garden is about as critical as matching a shirt/blouse with your pants/ skirt.

Similarly, a good landscape design should match your architecture in colour, scale and style. In so doing, your house and garden should complement each other.

The house must blend well into the landscape while the landscape frames should highlight the house’s design features.

Here is how you can tailor-make a garden to suit your house.

Colour scheme

Colour is one of the strongest design elements. As such it is important to coordinate the palette used in the garden with that used in the house to produce a cohesive design.

To increase your options, include colours that can easily be repeated in foliage or flowers when selecting the exterior finishes. These may include the popular beige shades, browns and the less popular greens.

Remember that your house is the backdrop of the garden. The challenge is to apply colours and materials that blend to bring out the house’s design features.

For instance, a cool house colour such as blue, green or purple works well with cool plant colours. Similarly, houses painted in warm colours like light yellow, pink or apricot harmonise with plantings that feature warm colours.

Next, you need to identify features of the house that you want to highlight such as an artistic column, an entrance porch or any other unique architectural feature. To highlight these features, frame them with contrasting plant colours. For instance, if the feature’s main colour is blue, plant red roses or geraniums on its either side to bring it out more strongly.

Scale

Scale is the relative size between the elements that make up a design. When an element is out of scale, it means it is either too small or too large for the other elements in the design.

For the garden to be in scale with the house, the sizes of its components should be more or less comparable to the house’s architectural features. Pay close attention to the sizes of the architectural features and try to replicate the same in the size of your hard and soft landscape elements.

For instance, if your house has large feature columns, incorporate planters that take their general form and size in your garden design. Similarly, a large tree may look just right in front of an expansive house but completely out of scale next to the sentry house.

Style

There are as many garden styles as there are architectural styles. Some of these styles are universal and can be adapted to a wide range of architectural settings. Others are more specific and are more suited to certain kinds of buildings only.

Overall, however, most garden styles can be classified as either formal or informal. Formal gardens feature rectilinear forms, neat edges and topiary. They are typically characterised by straightforward paths, strong symmetry and geometry.

If your house embodies most of these form concepts, it may be a good idea to carry them on to the landscape. There is, however, a school of thought that argues for contrasting formal architectural settings with informal garden styles. I leave that to your discretion.

Informal gardens feature curvilinear forms and relaxed edges. Paths meander and plants are left to grow and take their natural shapes. Nature and natural processes are controlled but are left to influence the look and feel of the garden. In an informal architectural setting, an informal garden is almost always desirable.

The writer is a landscape architect.