Landscaping is an essential finishing touch for any home, not only to beautify your building and grounds, but also to support good drainage and local wildlife. Here are some insights into landscaping for urban homes from a leading residential architect in NJ.
Green Roofing for Urban Buildings
Green roofs are becoming a popular option for urban homeowners where space for landscaping is scarce. It makes optimal use of your limited space in the city, creating a visually attractive feature where most rooftops are at best uninteresting and at worst an eyesore. It’s also a useful feature in cities where local building departments place restrictions on the amount of impervious surface area on a proposed building project, as your green roof can offset the amount of concrete flatwork, roofing and paving your project requires.
There are many other advantages to a properly designed green roof. For instance, they absorb rainfall and help prevent flooding, they insulate your home and offset the heat-trapping nature of city environments, and they decrease air pollution. They also create a natural space where you can relax, entertain, and enjoy nature.
Privacy in an Urban Environment
Landscaping should also work to provide your home with privacy, either in the form of hard and/or soft landscaping like bamboo screens, raised or sunken planter boxes or tall-growing plants. This allows you to hide private entrances or block of window views onto the road, as well as screen your home from wind or neighboring houses.
Access the Benefits of a Functional Garden
Many homeowners in the city want the benefit of growing their own fruit and vegetables or having access to a kitchen herb garden for fresh herbs. With the right approach to urban landscaping, a home can be designed to achieve this without the need for a huge yard space. Kitchen gardens can grow right outside your kitchen space in planters, fruit trees can serve dual-purposes as shade providers or ornamental plants around a small entertainment space, and more delicate fruit and vegetables can be placed in specially-designed spaces that provide enough sunshine while sheltering the plants from the elements.
Speak to a Residential Architect to Build the Urban Home of Your Dreams
With 20 years of experience in residential and commercial architecture in NJ, the architecture firm of Seth A. Leeb knows that the secret to creating outstanding homes is building a great client relationship. As a full-service architectural firm, we are able to assist our clients all the way from site analysis and design conception through to the construction of the home itself. For more information on our residential architect services in New Jersey, or to speak to a home architect, please contact us today or visit our website at http://leeb-architecture.com/.