Four ways to boost your home's kerb appeal

I’ve helped hundreds of home owners across Australia renovate their properties; including some amazing “street appeal” transformations on both high and low budgets.

One thing is true for all of these homes – the formula is always the same. It’s to follow the principles of good design – focus, balance, cohesion/repetition and anchoring.

Yes; paint, landscaping and all those components that make up a successful renovation are still necessary, but making sure they are used in accordance with the design principles make your home improvements exponentially effective.

In the following before and after images of this home in Daisy Hill, Brisbane, you can see how the use of balance, repetition and anchoring has dramatically improved street appeal as this house was renovated.

Balance is the use of similarly visually-weighted components in a space, in this case on the exterior of the home.

If the house is not symmetrical like this one in Daisy Hill, then you can still employ the balance design principle with the use of different materials or colours and even landscaping to even things up.

There are other ways to make sure your home looks balanced, including making sure the landscaping or fences are the correct visual weights – bushy or thinner plants? Solid or transparent fences? Or somewhere in between?

This is where similar colours, textures and shapes are repeated through the property to give a sense of cohesion.

Look for ways to repeat shapes (think angles, curves, slats etc) to give a sense of cohesion to the front of the house, yard, fence and everything you see from the street. If you can “link” the look of the house exterior to the house interior, you are helping to create one of the components of that all-important indoor-outdoor flow.

You can start with creating cohesion between the fence and the house by repeating some of the colours and materials from one to the next where appropriate.

Giving a property an anchor is to give it a sense of visual stability. An anchor is usually created by using a darker colour of something around the base of the house. When you don’t have an anchor, the house can tend to float visually.

Use landscaping or a contrasting material or colour to anchor your home and see what a difference it makes. Begin by noticing other homes in your area that have a darker “base” or landscaping close to the dwelling itself and see what effect these anchors have.

Creating a focal point is a great way to add interest to an otherwise flat or uninteresting home. Or, if the house has several possible entryways and you want to cement one as “the” entry to use over the others, a focal point can do the trick.

Most houses will benefit from a focal point, even if it’s simply a dark or bright coloured front door, some large pots located either side of the entry or something else that draws the eye to that location. I’ve used all sorts of ways to create focal points; including a new entry deck, a cool awning over the front door, landscaping or planter boxes and a new path.

It may seem like all a designer does is choose some nice colours and materials, but as you can see the design principles have a major impact on the level of “amazing” a renovation turns out to be.

Before you spend your hard earned money (and time) upgrading the kerb appeal of your home, get your design principles clear so that all the colours, materials and components you select create the best aesthetic experience possible!

Jane Eyles-Bennett is renovation mad and has been a professional designer for 23 years. She was a renovation designer on the TV series Property Climbers, winner of several interior design awards and design consultant to over 600 property owners in the past nine years.

►Have a renovation or design topic idea? Contact Jane at jane@hotspaceconsultants.com or via her website.