Update Your Home with Creative Walkways

A beautifully landscaped yard is a point of pride for many homeowners, and a creative walkway or path can make a pretty garden even more welcoming to guests. If your home’s only walkway is a boring concrete sidewalk, adding a personalized path that complements your landscaping will update your home and add pizzazz to your yard. Keep reading for some walkway design ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

Match Your Walkway to the Garden

Just like any other decorative element—outdoor fireplaces, arbors, and other outdoor living structures—walkways should complement their surroundings. There are different ways to achieve that goal. If, for instance, your yard is wooded and feels more like a forest than a traditional English garden, a meandering path lined with natural stone or locally sourced timber will be a more logical walkway design than a perfectly straight path made from brick pavers. On the other hand, if your home and its landscaping follow a contemporary design scheme with lots of straight lines and angles, a curved walkway could serve as a contrasting, but still complementary, element that will help create a softer, more welcoming entrance.

Consider Functional Additions

Adding unique sculptures and pieces of lawn art is an excellent way to further personalize your yard and extend your home’s design scheme into the great outdoors. For walkways, however, think about function, too. A bench placed along the path, perhaps near a shady tree, water feature, or blooming flowerbed, is a welcoming addition that invites visitors to take their time and admire the results of your hard work in the yard. Use your walkway design to accent these resting spots along the path. Widening the walkway, for example, is a trick many landscapers use to subtly signal to visitors that they have reached a place to pause.

Think Outside the Box

There are so many possibilities for creative walkways—the only limit truly is your imagination. While there certainly are some classic designs in landscaping, paths and walkways do not necessarily have to be constructed from rectangular bricks or square pavers. They don’t have to follow straight lines, either. Mix different materials to suit your style—slabs of local stone anchored in pea gravel, for example, or brick pavers paired with a groundcover that will creep to cover any exposed soil. Vary shapes to create visual interest, and use plants to add color and definition. Use edging, mulch, and landscaping fabric to create sharper, more defined edges and designs, and consider mixing in colored stones, mosaic pieces, or dyed concrete for additional artistic flair.

Creative walkways can fill two roles: they can help visitors navigate safely to your front door or through your yard, and they can also serve as unique garden art installations. As you plan, remember to consider the purpose of the walkway. Does it lead to your front door? Does it wind around the side of the house to the backyard? How often will it be used? These details will help you decide how wide the path should be and which materials will work best. Hire a reputable landscaping contractor or tackle this project on your own, and soon enough, you’ll have a beautiful new walkway to accent your home.