A curved entryway can be an excellent addition to Cambridge, MA home’s landscape design, whether it's just a simple entranceway with curved steps or an elaborate spiral staircase leading to your front door. Here are five functional and aesthetic reasons why you would want to choose a curved entryway for your home’s front yard.
Following a Natural Design Language
Curved entryways are the ideal choice if your landscape design conforms to a more natural design language. A natural landscape design is characterized by a more relaxed approach to your hardscape and softscape features with less of a focus on order and conformity than other approaches. And it is generally favored for more traditional homes. Curved shapes can be ideal for such a landscape design, making a curved entryway a fitting choice for your traditional home’s entrance.
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Creating a Flowing Design
One of the primary reasons a front entranceway is a great option for your landscape design is that it has the potential to flow beautifully with existing masonry and plantings. In general, a straight entranceway with right angles tends to look awkward, especially for larger homes with a substantial front yard. With such front yards, walkways and driveways are also typically curved, so that makes a curved front entranceway the obvious choice. The front facade of your home is also a strong determinant of how you want to shape your front entranceway. For example, if your home has a lot of arches and curves, especially above the front door, a curved front entranceway would help preserve the design’s flow into the front yard.
Creating a Balance
Whatever the overall design language of your front yard’s landscape design, creating a balance is important. This means mixing in both linear and curved elements in a balanced fashion, something a curved front entranceway can help you achieve easily. For example, for a straight walkway leading to your home’s front entrances, you can create a simple entrance with outward facing curved steps. This helps create a front entrance that syncs well with the straight walkways while still introducing a curved element to the design. The amount of curvature you introduce can also be adapted to suit your landscape’s design, especially for more modern landscapes, where a front entrance with a shallow curve can work wonders for the balance of your yard.
Adding Some Pizzazz
Curved entranceways are a great focal point that can add some pizzazz to your home’s front facade. The simplest and most common variants generally have outward curving steps, which you can further enhance with fencing or supporting walls on the sides. A spiraling staircase is a more elaborate venture that generally requires more expertise on your contractor’s part, but helps create an entranceway that not only looks amazing but also helps raise your home’s curb appeal.
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Practical Considerations
In addition to the design aspect, some practical considerations can influence your choice of the front entranceway. Especially for homes with a small yard, a curved entranceway can save valuable space by curving toward the side of the home, opening up space for other hardscape or softscape projects. A completely circular curved entranceway can make efficient use of your yard’s space, doubling as a small patio for your home and giving you a great place to relax just a few steps away from your door.
