Transform Your Home With These High-Impact Exterior Design Ideas

Yardzen’s Exterior Design practice helps homeowners reimagine the facade of their home. Changes to your home’s paint, siding, roof, windows, front door, lighting, garage door, mailbox, and house numbers are transformative. Bundled with our online landscaping offerings, Yardzen’s Curb Appeal and Outdoor Transformation packages are how homeowners across the country are creating beautiful, functional, and sustainable outdoor spaces.

If your home and yard need a refresh, but you don’t know where to start, our talented team of designers share their list of high-impact changes to your home’s landscaping and exterior.

For this home in Seattle, the homeowners purchased Yardzen’s Curb Appeal package, which bundles our landscaping design services with an exterior design for the front of your home. Their vision: to reimagine this tract home into a modern farmhouse inspired by Magnolia. But, how to achieve the look? Yardzen’s team set to work on reimagining this home with high-impact exterior design decisions, including paint, windows, doors, garage doors, stone accents, and lighting. The result: the homeowner’s dream home and a significant increase in their property value (exterior and landscaping improvements combined can increase your home value by 20% or more).

Paint

Paint is transformative. A fresh coat can make you fall in love with your house again. In the above, our design team reimagined this outdated facade into a fresh, bright home with Benjamin Moore’s Chantilly Lace, our top choice for an exterior white. Changing the home’s color was the single most impactful decision they could make, although it is the rest of the exterior design elements that really tie it all together.

Garage Doors

For those of us with a garage at the front of our homes, garage doors make a huge difference on the overall appearance of the property. There is so much that we love about this Yardzen transformation in Seattle, including the paint, stone accents, and fresh new landscaping, but the garage doors are such a statement. The mix of woods and whites achieves the homeowner’s vision for a modern farmhouse exterior.

Windows

White houses with black trim are a trend that we’re seeing everywhere these days, but also, it’s a timeless look that recalls the elegance of colonial homes. Here, our designers added black windows to achieve the modern farmhouse aesthetic.

In partnership with our window and door partner Marvin, our design team can help you select new, high-quality, energy-efficient windows perfectly suited to your style.

Front DooR

The front door sets the tone for the rest of the house. Front doors do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to curb appeal. There are an endless array of front doors on the market, from stately wood doors to elegant glass doors to detailed craftsmanship doors to ultra-modern metal doors, to rustic pass-through doors, and Yardzen’s design team is here to help you pick which type of door best suits your home. Or, what color to paint your existing door (one of our favorite front door hacks).

The front door in this transformation ties the whole front facade together, blending the garage doors with the bright exterior and black windows. Plus, the new mailboxes and house numbers, both included in Yardzen’s exterior packages, really make the front door shine.

Landscaping

Over the past couple of years, we’ve realized that you can’t decouple landscaping and exterior design. It is the plants, hardscaping, furniture, paint, windows, doors that make a yard and a home’s facade. We recommend pairing the two practices whenever possible to ensure the most impactful transformation and the creation of your dream outdoor space.

Lighting

We love exterior lighting for many reasons. One, it looks great and helps to define your exterior’s aesthetic. Second, they are incredibly functional. In the words of Yardzen’s co-founder and CEO, Allison Messner, exterior lights are a “game changer,” enabling outdoor living into the evening. Pictured here: Exterior lights from Yardzen’s exterior partner Rejuvenation.

Siding

To help achieve the shiplap look of many modern farmhouses, we encouraged the homeowners to embrace their existing siding, which they had come to think of as outdated. With fresh white paint, the insulating panels add intrigue to the exterior of the home. When you sign up for an exterior package, Yardzen’s design team will help you choose the best siding for your home, whether that’s FSC-certified wood, composite, brick, stucco, or anything else!

Stone Accents

Since we know you’ll ask, yes, you can paint the stone outside your home. But, we do recommend consulting with your contractor, painter, or local paint store to ensure that you have the right type of paint. Here, our team recommended making the beautiful stonework more neutral, which still adds character to the house but isn’t as much of a contrast.

Stone accents add depth and character to many styles of homes, including craftsman houses, classic homes, ranchers, midcentury modern homes, mountain houses, and more. Our design team is happy to help you add a stone accent to the outside of your home, or help you reimagine existing stone accents.

Decor

As with any yard, styling makes a huge impact on your home’s exterior. That includes mailboxes, house numbers, wreaths, door decor, and planters. Yardzen’s design team can make recommendations about all of these elements when you purchase an exterior design package.

Get started on your exterior transformation today!