Home exterior design tips: Hear from the experts
Welcome back to our new design series exploring the top exterior design tips to consider when building your new home. This week we’re taking you through the very first step when choosing selections for your home, finding your style. A theme keeps you on track when making design decisions and allows each area of your home to flow and feel connected.
For a lot of us, this process can feel a little overwhelming, especially if this is your first time building a new home. That’s why we’ve sat down with our 3 industry experts to bring you the most up to date advice and insider tips on how to narrow down your style and nail your exterior selections.
Take our Style Quiz
To help make navigating your personal design style simpler, we’ve created a quiz that identifies your individual taste and matches it to a design scheme. Carefully curated by our expert interior design team, you’ll discover your style along with all our recommended materials and finishes to recreate this look in your own home! Take the quiz now.
Our expert Sarah says that once you have an understanding of your style, all your selections will flow from here, “For example, Coastal Hamptons style homes will often incorporate weatherboard cladding and are usually constructed in a colour pallet of lighter hues such as white, neutrals, greys and blues with brighter striking features and mouldings.”
Create Mood Boards
A mood board is a visual representation of ideas for a design project. At its most basic, a mood board is a collage of images. This is a great way to collect inspiration, explore ideas and set the tone for your homes’ style. Whether this is in person playing with samples in our incredible showroom, or online, creating a mood board will help you visualise your selections and can help direct you to what does and doesn’t work. If you’re looking for an easy online option, Pinterest is a fantastic platform for sourcing inspiration and can serve as an online mood board.
Briana’s Top Tip: When you are deciding your style, an important point to remember is to compliment your surrounds, but don’t blend into them. Let your style shine!
Explore Display Homes
Things often appear differently on a screen, so we always recommend visiting display homes as well as our showroom to give you a more accurate idea of how things might look. You might love the idea of a particular benchtop, but when you see it in real life the colour or finish isn’t quite what you had in mind. Or perhaps you had your heart set on a particular floorplan, but once you walked into a display home with the same layout you realised it wouldn’t work for your family and lifestyle.
Remember to also take photos of homes you like, even if they aren’t a display home, your builder may be able to accommodate.
Katrina’s Top Tip: “I think the hardest thing is finding one style and sticking with it. I always say I’m going to need five houses to really enjoy all of my preferences, but the best tip I could give would be to keep the shell of your home as neutral as possible and accentuate the things that are changeable.”
Most importantly, have fun with it
Contract Administrator and design expert Sarah says, “It’s always a great idea to think of the exterior and interior collectively when it comes to choosing a style for your home, as the front elevation sets the vibe for what awaits inside.” So do your research, find a style that really speaks to you and carry this through the entirety of your home. Take your time with the process and most importantly, have fun with it!
