With the change of seasons comes a desire for renewal. It’s the perfect time to find innovative ways to enhance the beauty of your home.
Your home is an extension of yourself and it is only natural that as you evolve your aesthetic tastes, these refinements will naturally be reflected in the look of your home.
A couple of the most impactful ways to increase a home’s curb appeal are to make your front entrance more welcoming and to implement elegant, dramatic lighting.
Make the front entrance welcoming
The centerpiece of any entrance are the exterior doors. All the other entrance elements can then be cued from the door’s design.
You current doors may be completely functional, but also completely forgettable, if they lack character or uniqueness. Installing new custom-crafted doors will immediately create a more authentic, stylish look that is both inviting and memorable to your visitors and yourself.
Once the design of the exterior doors is decided, you can then build the other components of the entryway around them. For example, if you add side lights or a transom (windows to the side or above) the shape and texture of the entrance is more pronounced and framed. Glass elements provide a range of design options to the creative homeowner — etchings, custom iron works, and glazing are all tools to express your artistic vision.
Along with the new door you would also select updated hardware, perhaps to match a motif created in the sidelight or transom design.
The finish could be a wood stain to accentuate the woodgrain of a solid wood door, or it could be a bold colour that complements the overall colour theme of your home’s exterior. Concsciously creating a symmetry of the fixtures will add harmony to your overall look.
Elegant, dramatic lighting
Once your exterior doors have been rejuvenated, you can also add curb appeal by implementing elegant, dramatic lighting to your entrance and walkway. Even as your visitors park their cars, their eyes will be drawn to where your lights guide them.
You can easily add lights along the walkways, creating a fanciful stepping path to follow to your door. Depending on your greenery, you can put lights between your shrubs, or in your trees. Everyone loves to see lights in the trees, in all seasons, creating reminders of far off Street Cafe’s twinkling along the promenade in Cannes, or New Year’s Eve on West Coast shores of Tofino.
In lieu of trees you can create mounted coach lanterns on either side of your exterior doors, and also on stands along your pathways.
In addition to the exterior lighting, you can also plan to use your indoor lighting to shine through your sidelights, front windows and transom. This will give your entrance that welcoming glow. Lighting is a simple yet powerful way to create an emotional response, however subconscious.
Why not take a look at your home from the point of view of a first time guest? What is the first impression you get when you drive up to it in the late evening as the sun is going down? You can make this impression exactly what you want — your only limit is your own imagination.
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