When choosing where and how to build a new deck for your St. John, IN, home, a skilled deck builder will use expert landscape design principles to achieve the most beauty and function. These guidelines can help you end up with the deck and landscape of your dreams.
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Landscape Design Principles
Line: Line in landscape design refers to the way horizontal and vertical elements are used to bring harmony to the plants. Vertical lines include trees of various heights, shrubs that grow taller, and flowers that grow tall. Horizontal lines can refer to the way the planting beds are positioned in the yard and the appearance of the top of a fence line.
Other lines that can influence a design can be curving lines of a landscape bed as these are seldom geometric and tend to be more freeform. Straight lines can appear in a walkway and in outdoor features such as a patio or outdoor kitchen.
Texture: A landscape designer seeks to include many types of texture in the landscape. This can be accomplished with landscape boulders, natural wood elements, and the size and shape of leaves on the shrubs. Smooth, glossy, dull, and rough can all describe the textures they seek to include through plant, tree, and grass selections.
Scale: Your landscape designer will seek to make the landscape interesting with various sizes in the landscape plan. No one wants to look at a landscape where everything is the same size.
Balance: Balance can be achieved in several ways but the two most common can be the symmetrical and asymmetrical planting design. Symmetrical ensures that there is visual and physical balance by having one side mirror the other while asymmetrical planting means that one side differs from the other but when seen together, they look balanced.
Using Design Principles for Decks
Your deck builder can use these rules to make your deck stand out in the landscape for its perfect size and planting beauty that surrounds the structure. You want a fresh, up-to-date deck to be a focal point in the backyard, the element that your eye goes to right away. Utilizing the balance principle, the deck builder can plan to implement a two level deck that allows for relaxing in comfortable furniture on one and dining for the other.
By placing the deck at the back door for easy access, the horizontal plane of the deck can contrast with the vertical structure of the house, creating a pleasing aesthetic. Ensuring that the deck spans the entire back of your home can mean that when looking at your home, the deck feels proportional and correct in scale.
Transitioning from one level to the next and finally to the grassy yard is an important consideration, too. Once in the yard, your landscaper can use balance as a guide for a walkway composed of landscape stepping stones or landscape pavers to give you a durable, safe surface for moving around the living space.
By adding the same planting plan on each side of the deck, the appearance will be symmetrical in both texture and color. On each side of the walkway, they can plan for colorful flowers and pops of greenery to give the space a pleasing palette
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