Making A Small Yard Appear Larger Through Landscaping: 5 Helpful Tips
There are few things more rewarding than spending time in the outdoors. Palatial gardens surrounding large estates provide peace and refuge for a home's residents, but what about the rest of us? What if your yard feels too small to be functional? The right landscaping can make even the smallest yard feel larger.
Here are 5 helpful tips you can use to enhance the function of your outdoor living space in the future.
1. Think Vertical
Having a vast expanse of lawn is one way to create the feeling of space, but smaller yards don't allow for this feature. In order to give your small yard a larger feel, you should think vertical. Smaller yards appear larger when you can't see all of the living spaces at once.
Try taking advantage of slight grades, wall enclosures, and plant screens as vertical dividers in your outdoor living space.
2. Work Your Angles
While large yards can accommodate straight paving stones when it comes to creating pathways, smaller spaces can be made to feel larger by laying paving stones on an angle. Installing the paving stones in your pathway on a diagonal will elongate your outdoor living space, tricking the eye into thinking the area is larger than it really is.
3. Take Advantage Of Proportions
When it comes to selecting foliage for your small yard, bigger is better. By choosing plants that have large, broad leaves for areas you want to emphasize, you help to draw the focus to these areas, allowing the rest of your yard to be receded.
This optical illusion, combined with the illusion of depth given by the shadows large leaves create, will help your small outdoor living space appear larger.
4. Incorporate Shapes
The right kind of geometry can be a great way to make smaller yards appear more spacious. Introducing various shapes into your yard can mark boundaries and create focus points. Be sure that you combine the use of lines, angles, and shapes without cluttering your yard to achieve an outdoor living space that feels larger.
5. Carefully Incorporate Color
An understanding of basic color theory can be beneficial when trying to make a small yard feel larger. Warmer colors like oranges, reds, or browns draw the eye in. Cooler colors (think purples, blues, or pinks) often recede into the background.
Planting flowers with warm-colored blooms near your focus, and reserving cool-colored plants for around the exterior of your yard, can help create the illusion of space by tricking the eye into seeing depth that isn't really there.
When you know how to utilize basic landscaping principles like color, shapes, and the use of vertical space properly, you can make even the smallest outdoor living space feel larger than it is.