Designing an exterior facade that’s beautiful and inviting!
Designing an exterior facade for your home that's beautiful and inviting has the power to create a lasting first impression!
While interiors are often the focus of home renovations, the exterior is so important because it increases your street appeal, adds value to your home, signals what to expect with your interiors and can showcase your personal style!
We’ve seen it many times with our clients - when the exterior façade is refreshed, they feel a sense of pride and a lovely emotional connection with their home… giving warm vibes when they arrive home every day!
So, whether you’re doing a bigger renovation or a cosmetic refresh, we always advise putting aside the time, consideration, and budget into the exterior design, ensuring it’s cohesive with the overall look and feel of your home.
Follow our guide to design an exterior facade that's beautiful and inviting! And remember, you'll get big rewards by investing in your homes exterior design!
1. Decide your homes overall design style
Create a mood board to set the vibe and the feeling you’re trying to evoke with your home. This will lead your thinking for the interior and exterior design.
For the style of your exterior façade, also consider your home’s location, surrounds, and the streetscape. For example, the style of homes in a coastal suburb, an inner-city or high-density suburb or a leafy, more traditional suburb, will most likely influence the direction for your home’s exterior look and feel.
2. Create your colour palette
A colour refresh will be one of the most significant elements to elevate your home’s exterior!
Take the lead from the design style you’ve set for your home as well as the colours you’re seeing in your area. Check out other homes for the colours that feature heavily in your suburb, and what you consider suits your area. Consider if you want to achieve a softer, fresher look with lighter tones or a more dramatic look with darker tones.
3. Layer your materials
An absolute must is to use a combination of different materials and textures on your exterior façade so that your home doesn’t appear flat and clinical… by introducing a combination of materials, you’ll achieve character, interest, depth and dimension.
Different materials to consider includes cladding, brick, stone, timber, metal and finishes such as rendering or bagging.
This example of our Wollstonecraft Project shows four materials being used to create interest and an elevated luxe look!
- The exterior walls have been ‘bagged’ and painted.
- Natural timber on the deck and front door.
- Painted timber for the fretwork.
- Sandstone used on top of the pillar
Fun fact: ‘Bagging’ is an alternative to rendering. Bagging delivers more texture as you can still see the brickwork and a painted colour is applied on top, embracing any bumps and imperfections. Rendering creates a more clean, modern finish with a flat, smooth finish.
4. Select your lighting
As always, our advice is to never underestimate the power of lighting when designing your home! For the exterior façade, it’s a critical element to create a welcoming and inviting ambience…. but it also needs to be practical.
Our top tips are…..
- For the decorative feature lights in your exterior façade (eg: the lights at your front door or your front gate), the style of the shade is important! Refer back to your design style because that will lead you in the right style direction.
- Think about the features of your garden and exterior design that you want to show off…. is there a magnificent mature tree you want as the centrepiece, a water feature that you want to be on display or does your home have textural cladding you’d like to highlight…. Use up-lights and focused lighting to show off these elements.
- From a practical perspective think about the locations light is needed – navigating to the front door, visibility of your house number etc. Sensors, strip lighting or discrete step lighting can be ideal in these applications.
5. Create a lush garden and landscape
This is a biggie! Speaking off adding dimension and character to your home – landscaping goes a LONG way to achieving that! And for all the same reasons as we’ve already mentioned- a beautiful garden adds texture and colour….. and on the practical side, planting is also a great way to add shade and privacy.
Key elements to consider are…..
- Use grass to soften the appearance and create a welcoming feeling to your exterior. Plus grass adds a vibrant pop of colour and energy.
- Pots and planters are a lovely addition especially at the front door or on the balcony. With different pot shapes, sizes and colours available, you can use pots to create contrast and interest. You can also have a bit more fun with your potted plants too by selecting fragrance and vibrant colours if you wish!
- Create a clear pathway with your landscape, that leads to your front door! It’ll add charm and a welcoming touch. This is also a great way to add a different material finish – stone steps or a timber pathway for example.
- Add curves where possible! Our homes exteriors naturally have lots of sharp square edges, so think about adding curves to bring soft organic vibes! Consider a curved edge for your grass, curved planters or circular pots to do the trick!
- Environmental factors – integrating hardy, low maintenance plants that can endure the long stretches of dry weather we often experience! It'll save you the hassle and cost of constantly watering (and reviving) your garden!
And for some more inspiration on how to create a comfy, inviting and stylish outdoor space, check out our previous blog post here!
There you have it – our guide to the most impactful steps you can take when designing an exterior facade that's beautiful and inviting!
When you think about it, planning the exterior façade isn’t too dissimilar to planning your interiors! The key elements are developing your style, selecting a colour palette, add texture, lighting and some lovely planting to elevate the space! For a bit of effort, you’ll get big rewards with your exterior façade!
If you’re looking for some support with your home renovation or refresh project, we’d love to hear from you! You can click here to book a complimentary 20min Discovery Call, we’d love to chat about your project.
Anna x