How to Build Your Dream Home and Garden Landscapes

The order of work that separates a garden that lasts from one rebuilt in three years — plans, levels, drainage, services, hard landscaping, then planting and lighting. Almost every disappointing garden was built in the wrong order. Paving goes down before drainage is solved, planting goes in before the levels are final, the outdoor kitchen is positioned before anyone works out where the gas, water and power will come from, and three years later half of it is dug up again. A dream garden is mostly a sequencing problem. Begin with a measured plan of the whole property, even if the work will be staged over a decade. Mark boundaries, the house footprint, doors and windows, existing trees, the fall of the land, the path of the sun in summer and winter, prevailing wind, and where you look from the rooms you use most. Every good decision that follows comes from this drawing, and it costs nothing but an afternoon. Settle finished levels and drainage next. Decide the height of every terrace, step and lawn against the finished floor level of the house, then work out where water goes in a downpour — surface falls away from the building, subsoil...

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Home Designs

Low-Line Courtyard Home Design with Textured Off-White Render and Covered Alfresco Dining Terrace

Low-Line Courtyard Home Design with Textured Off-White Render, Travertine Paving and Smoked Glass Balustrades, Layered Native Planting and a Clipped. this image created by www.homedesign-photos.com — Low-Line Courtyard Home Design with Textured Off-White Render, Travertine Paving and Smoked Glass Balustrades, Layered Native Planting and a Clipped Buffalo Lawn, featuring a Covered Alfresco Dining Terrace and Built-In Outdoor Kitchen, finished with Sculptural Feature Planting and Inviting

Th3 08 is part of our Home Designs collection — one of 512 large-format widescreen concept visuals in this section. It is presented here at full size so you can study the layout, the planting, the surfaces and the way light falls across the design before you commit to building anything on your own block.

Front yards, backyards, side boundaries and complete house concepts, including the tiny home series. Use this concept as a starting point: note the proportions between built form and greenery, where shade and shelter sit, how paths and paved areas move people through the space, and which materials repeat to hold the whole scheme together.

Every visual on this site is a design idea created for Home Design Photos. Browse the rest of the Home Designs collection, or open the complete image catalogue to see every home, garden, pool, pergola, furniture, lighting and beach house concept in one place.

← Modern House Design with Rendered White Walls and Shaded Deck, Long Dining Table Architectural Home Design with Limestone Cladding and Poolside Cabana, Sun Deck and Evening Entertaining →

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Contemporary Family Home Design with Board-Formed Concrete and Wide Front Entry Court, Feature Water

Contemporary Family Home Design with Board-Formed Concrete, Spotted Gum Battens and Matte Black Steel Detailing, Mass-Planted Hedging, Feature Palms and Deep Mulched Garden Beds, featuring a Wide Front Entry Court, Feature Water Bowl and Garage Screening

Low-Line Courtyard Home Design with Textured Off-White Render and Covered Alfresco Dining Terrace

Low-Line Courtyard Home Design with Textured Off-White Render, Travertine Paving and Smoked Glass Balustrades, Layered Native Planting and a Clipped Buffalo Lawn, featuring a Covered Alfresco Dining Terrace and Built-In Outdoor Kitchen, finished with Sculptural Feature Planting and Inviting

Contemporary Family Home Design with Board-Formed Concrete and Wide Front Entry Court, Feature Water

Split-Level Modern Home Design with Recycled Brick and Spacious Rear Backyard and BBQ Grill

Split-Level Modern Home Design with Recycled Brick, Vertical Cedar Screening and Zinc Roof Sheeting, Espaliered Trees, Box Hedging and Fine-Leaf Groundcover, featuring a Spacious Rear Backyard and BBQ Grill Entertaining Area, balanced by Clean Sightlines, Shaded Retreats and Relaxed

Contemporary Family Home Design with Board-Formed Concrete and Wide Front Entry Court, Feature Water

Architectural Home Design with Limestone Cladding and Poolside Cabana, Sun Deck and Evening Entertaining

Architectural Home Design with Limestone Cladding, Warm Oak Soffits and Slim Charcoal Aluminium Frames, Tropical Foliage, Frangipani and Screening Bamboo, featuring a Poolside Cabana, Sun Deck and Evening Entertaining Zone, balanced by Clean Sightlines, Shaded Retreats and Relaxed Family

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Black and Charcoal Modern Home Exterior Design Ideas and Photos

Dark cladding, charcoal brick and matte black detailing — the moody modern exterior done properly, with the heat and maintenance questions answered.

A dark house has enormous presence. Charcoal brick, black stained timber, dark standing seam metal and matte black frames absorb light instead of reflecting it, which makes the form of the building read as a single sculptural mass. Against green planting the effect is dramatic, and it is the reason dark homes dominate architectural photography. The trade offs are real though, and every successful dark home has answered them at design stage rather than after the paint dried.

Heat is the first question. Dark surfaces absorb more radiant heat, so insulation, a ventilated cavity behind cladding, a light coloured roof where it cannot be seen, and shading over glass all matter more than they would on a pale house. Get those right and a dark home performs perfectly well; skip them and you have built a heat store. The second question is dust and finish — matte and textured surfaces hide marks, while gloss black shows every fingerprint and water spot.

Contrast makes the style liveable. The dark envelope needs one warm element to stop it feeling severe: a timber entry, a lit soffit, brass or bronze hardware, or a pale stone step. Inside, the palette usually reverses entirely — light floors, white walls, timber joinery — so the house feels bright the moment you cross the threshold. That deliberate flip between dark outside and light inside is the signature of the best examples.

Modern Homes design ideas photo from the Black and Charcoal Modern Home Exterior Design Ideas and Photos feature. this image created by www.homedesign-photos.com

In the garden, dark walls are the perfect backdrop for planting. Silver and lime foliage, ornamental grasses, birch or crepe myrtle trunks and flowering white all pop against charcoal in a way they never do against brick. Pale paving and gravel lift light back up onto the cladding, and lighting should be warm and low, washing up the wall and through foliage rather than flooding the elevation. The result is a home that looks quietly expensive by day and genuinely cinematic at night.

House Design Photos is a HUGE Library Gallery and Directory of Home Design Photos

How to Build Your Dream Home and Garden Landscapes

Low-Line Courtyard Home Design with Textured Off-White Render and Covered Alfresco Dining Terrace

More Home Designs concepts

Black and Charcoal Modern Home Exterior Design Ideas and Photos