Designing around a smaller home is a challenge for many homeowners. The absence of space makes it difficult to know what to prioritize and where to put plants and hardscapes. We especially see theses issues in the Minneapolis and St. Paul urban areas. In this blog post, we’ll discuss a few tips and tricks we like to use here at KG Landscape when we design landscapes for smaller homes in the Minneapolis area. 

Scale

Scale is the most important aspect to consider when talking about a smaller home. In the front yard, plants and shrubs should only come up to bottom of the windows, not any higher. Try to use more narrow shrubs/trees instead of wide, spreading ones. We like using holmstrup arborvitaes or pinnacle birches instead of huge red maples or oaks. The same goes for small perennials too. We love tall grasses like karl foerster and flowers like lillies to provide more of that sense of scale in a small yard. 

Keep the Lawn

Don’t take up too much of the lawn. Leave at least 3/4 of your outside space as grass. Lawn space is key to making a house feel like a home. It’s also comparatively very inexpensive to install and relatively easy to maintain. A larger home might be able to fit 3 rows of plantings in the front yard but a smaller home could only do 1-2 rows. One of the biggest mistakes we see with smaller homes is not achieving balance in the mulch/rock beds and lawn space. Mulch beds need to be refreshed every year or two and rock is very expensive to install so minimize those costs by leaving at least a little bit of lawn space. 

Use a Design

Design is super important. Utilize space and money as efficiently as possible. Depending on your goals, you might need more or less patio space which will allow for more or less plants. A designer can help you narrow down the goals you have and match those goals up with your budget. A big garden with lots of mulch and plants can feel very closed in. Knowing which plants to install will keep your plant beds looking beautiful and open all year. Installing proper screening can leave the yard feeling open but also block views. 

Find Places to Pop

In a smaller yard, you want to use plants that don’t take much a lot of space but still provide a lot of POP. We like to recommend using window boxes or annual displays by the front door. In a larger home/yard, we’ll install 3 rows of plants that can each have different color and flowering time and interest. On a smaller home/yard, you need to optimize the space so smaller annuals in  planter boxes and pots will give that same color and pop in a smaller space. 

KG Landscape has been in the landscape design business for almost 15 years. All of that built up experience has given us the opportunity to see a lot of different landscape situations. We then use that expertise to provide the most value to our customers. If you have a smaller landscape and need some help, simply give us a call or submit a quick quote to our website and we’ll get back to you right away! You can also see more examples of small urban landscapes on our Pinterest page.

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