When you see a beautiful room, where does your eye break? It’s usually on something special that commands your attention, such as a piece of art above the fireplace or a dramatic floral arrangement onto a coffee table. Placing a strong visual component for impact is a classic designer’s trick. It uses the principle of accent to provide focus to a setting that may otherwise feel normal.
Emphasis is frequently used interchangeably with point of view, an idea that’s emphasized by Marjorie Elliott Bevlin at Design Through Discovery, my college design textbook in the 1980s. The fantastic thing is that the principles and components of design are universal, and even the years of time can not change them. We could draw inspiration from such rules and use them in our environments.
Bevlin describes in the book how to attain dramatic emphasis using five devices: lighting, direction, height, position and colour. Each of these ideas can be used in tandem with another or by itself.
Take a peek through these beautiful landscapes to find out how accent and point of view can enliven an outdoor area.
Frank & Grossman Landscape Contractors, Inc..
Produce an object of desire. An arbor at the distance shelters a garden bench, but in addition, it functions as a framework to highlight a classical sundial placed at the cross section of 2 intersecting pathways, changing a once-unnoticed corner of their backyard into a charming focus.
Studio William Hefner
Give prominence to an otherwise ordinary thing. Note wherever your gaze rests because you see the backyard. Emphasize the significance of that perspective by displaying a urn, a implanted boat or a little sculpture on a backyard table or base. The placement of a table having an elegant foundation gives this backyard market a heightened feeling.
Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture
Go diagonal. Enhance diagonal sight lines with pathways and plantings placed at a 45-degree angle into the house. This procedure allows extended views throughout the backyard when giving your landscape the illusion of being larger. Here, the diagonal stepping stone pathway has its own special point of view: a superbly placed modern planter, its own half-sphere bowl mirroring the mounded plant strains.
Sutton Suzuki Architects
Use light and reflections. While this home’s architectural lines are appealing, the structure is all the more magnificent after dark when exterior and interior lighting turn it into a glowing beacon. Light creates dramatic comparison — thus, accent. Furthermore, light could be reflected, which adds some mystery.
Viewpoint Lighting
Play with light. Here is just another illustration of how light can produce accent. Spotlighting and uplighting add glowing washes along the tree trunk and onto the face of a sculpture. Garden lighting produces a magical effect that gives the backyard a point of view after dark. It may take only a couple of fittings to accomplish this result.
Vintage Nursery & Landscape Co. / Alan Burke, asla
Highlight Mother Nature. Plant an eye catching island around the sunrise or sunset side of your home to take advantage of the way flat rays at dawn or dusk backlight branches, foliage and ornamentation. This beautiful island is a focal point, with large-scale urns integrated with a specimen tree, various shrubs and ground covers. It is almost as dramatic as the snow-capped mountain range in the distance.
TerraSculpture
Use colour for emphasis. The colour, form and placement of a piece of art elevates it into a place of prominence in this stylish rooftop garden. The glistening orange steel forms at”Tempest,” by Jennifer Gilbert Asher of TerraTrellis, make a compelling connection with the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. There’s also a whimsical interplay with the row of orange-blooming kargaroo paw plants against the white structure. Brilliant, in more ways than one.
Balance the scene. Frame an opinion with symmetrical plantings, for example trimmed hedge kinds or a set of flowering crab apple trees placed in all four quadrants around a fundamental component. This layout reveals an updated strategy to the conventional garden maze. Yes, it’s a perfectly symmetrical garden vignette, but the blue-glazed urn downplays stuffy formality.
Richard Kramer
Produce a portrait. A mixture of design, horticulture and art turns what could easily have been a prosaic part of fence in an intriguing moment from the landscape. The motivated placement of an Asian stone lantern is the detail that creates accent and a point of view. Every other element draws the eye to this place, from the vivid red canopy of the Japanese maple tree into the stepping-stone path.
A room with a view. It’s natural to need a point of view when we look through a window or doorway, but this unique home is so completely integrated into the landscape it’s hard to tell in which the backyard finishes and the inside starts. Certainly, the multitrunk tree would be the focus of this environment, and also the open-air structure is perfectly sited to exploit the vista. Wow!
Randy Thueme Design Inc. – Landscape Architecture
Journey’s end. This route leads through a stand of trees in which only dappled light beams, and it continues toward a distant, sunnier place from the landscape. By producing a walkway through the trees, a run of strong lines is highlighted along with the reduced, L-shape bench becomes the natural focus.