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Finding modern houses with contemporary house plans can be a tedious task. The design for a majority of modern houses is normally not bound by any rules or traditional house plan styles. In most cases, modern house plans have large expenses of high ceilings and large expenses of glass, with no small paned traditional windows.

Modern Houses

Typically, the characteristics of modern houses include clean and simple lines with what would be termed as large windows with ornamental trim, gabled or flat roofs, open floor plans, and asymmetrical shapes. Their contemporary exteriors are in most cases stone, stucco, wood, or brick. Their flat-roofed design resembles international style homes but lack the stark white surfaces.

Most contemporary home designs showcase typical materials and consists easy indoor-outdoor design. In the broadest understanding, contemporary houses would simply imply of recent design. The contemporary home or house style is difficult to differentiate from the modern sophisticated and simple home style, but they are strictly tied to most international housing style.

Modern Houses

Modern Houses

Modern Houses

Modern Houses

Similar Posts: Modern Houses Design, Small Modern House Plans, Ultra Modern Houses, Modern Houses Floor Plans

Main Characteristics of Modern Houses

Garden

Having limited outdoor space should not bar you from having a beautiful garden design. You can grow garden plants that save on space by serving the dual purpose of being ornamental as well as edible.

Here are 4 such plants for garden decor:

1. Sage
This is an evergreen shrub that has grey leaves and brilliant lilac flowers. Sage has high culinary value and can be used in your herbal tea for an additional delightful taste.

Garden

2. Kale
This plant belongs to the cabbage family. It may be a dark green or purple, but unlike the cabbage; its leaves do not form a central ball. It contains rich amounts of vitamin K and calcium.

3. Chives
These are a distant relative to the onion. They produce amazing flowers when they flourish. They can be used in the kitchen to add some mild flavor to your food.

4. Lavender
There are 40 different species of lavender. The purple leaves of lavender produce splendid beauty. Lavender has an appealing fragrance.

Encourage your creative juices to flow and soon you could be having the garden of everyone’s envy.

Garden

Garden

Garden

Garden

4 Dual-Purpose Plants for Small Garden

Recent studies have revealed the growing preference in improving backyard to be the gathering space for relaxation, entertaining & cooking in the home. At present, home owners are trying to bring all comforts of their indoor homes to outdoor by creating multi-purpose outdoor living spaces as extensions of their home due to versatility of decorative concrete.
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Outdoor furniture, also called garden furniture is a very important part of home improvement and home decor. Common types of outdoor furniture are made of wood, plastic, aluminum or wrought iron, and wicker. It is important to maintain this furniture and here’s what to do.
Wooden Furniture easily blends with nature and provides a very beautiful appearance. It can be maintained by painting or applying varnish to protect it from UV rays, make it water resistant and prevent ants from feeding off of it. Polyurethane should not be used on outdoor furniture because it causes cracking under constant exposure to UV rays.
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Inspiration comes in many forms and guises.  Sometimes I have to seek it out, other times it hits me as a surprise observation or a flash of an idea from out of the blue when I'm busy at another task (Weeding, anyone?).  I've written about a number of my inspirational influences here, so today I'd like to focus on just one:  my colleagues.

Last week I attended ProGreen Expo, the annual, week-long conference and trade show for landscape professionals in the Rocky Mountain and High Plains regions.  With over 100 seminars to attend and 600 vendor booths to visit, it's the perfect opportunity to find inspiration.  If you didn't know it before, I'll tell you now:  people in the green industry — designers, contractors, irrigation specialists, arborists, etc. — are extremely open and sharing with their expertise and information. Regardless of what part of the country they work in or the size of their business, there is usually a new idea or fresh perspective that I can adapt.  Here are just a few of the ideas that I gleaned from my colleagues...

Inspiration:  tools and technology
Roundtable member Susan Cohan taught a couple of sessions on digital imagery as design tools. My aha! moment came with her tutorial on using "secret", or hidden, Pinterest boards to collaborate with clients.  Design styles, specific plants, hardscape products, colors, etc. can be reviewed and edited to help communicate and customize a landscape or garden design. Did I spend the weekend reorganizing and expanding my Pinterest site?  Yes. Yes I did!

Photographs are a key component of my business, so I'm always looking for good tips and examples to help me improve my landscape and plant photos.  Rich Pomerantz, a master photographer with a beautiful portfolio, had some solid reminders / ideas for me (which I ran right out and tried):

1.  Play with the depth of field.  Not everything has to be in focus all the time.

2.  Play with the light. Back-lit "rimmed" subjects can be lovely.

3.  Shadows can be your friends (they make the subject look more three dimensional).
4.  Sometimes you want to "sell the steak" with your photo, sometimes you want to "sell the sizzle."

Inspiration:  regionalism
Another Roundtable member, David Christiani, gave two presentations on using regional cues to create designs that have a visual "sense of place" and are sustainable.  David recommends not only knowing your climate (much more than the USDA Hardiness Zone), but also the plant patterns of your eco-zone.  Plants are going to form groups and colonies — patterns, if you will — differently in the high plains than they do in the desert or woodlands, for example.  Recreating those patterns in the built landscape will go a long way towards creating a regional design, even when different plants are substituted.
Here's an example of a built landscape in my neighborhood park that replicates that of the high plains region. Grasses are the dominant plant species with the occasional  shrub, thicket, or tree.  Woody plants have naturalized here more than the norm because of their proximity to a lake and drainage/irrigation ditch.
             (More of Rich's photo tips:
             5.  Use the line of a path, wall, planting bed, etc to take the viewer's eye from the corner of the    image into the center.
             6.  The foreground doesn't always have to be in focus.)

This look could be interpreted in a home landscape by emphasizing low profile plantings with the occasional tall accent plant, something like this:

Denver, Colorado, designer unknown

Inspiration:  Collaboration

The idea of backyard landscaping is a wonderful one to add elegance to a home. When you are looking for beautiful backyard landscaping ideas, there are abundant and limitless options. You need to do a lot of research and combine the various great landscaping ideas to find an exact one that meets all your needs and expectations.

Here are few tips to give a good backyard landscaping idea to your home:
# Add Evergreens
When choosing the kinds of plants, always remember to have evergreens in your backyard to give it a pleasant look all year round. Evergreen shrubs and trees are attractive, low maintenance and multi-purpose.
With their habit of thick growth, evergreen plants when planted like a hedge make good barriers for providing privacy. Evergreen plants have foliage in all seasons and add color to your landscape.
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Most home gardeners think that the spring is the ideal growing season due to its longer day time as well as the warmer temperature and the cold temperature in the autumn and winter is like the end of the gardeners’ world.
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'Moonshine' yarrow dusted with snow on a frigid winter day.

I recently visited the campus of Colorado State University and came across this relatively new hardscape/planting.  I was pleased to see the perfect pairing of support to plant.  This young wisteria vine, Wisteria sinensis, will continue to develop and form a massive, woody structure.  The arbor — although it looks like wood from a distance — is actually welded steel (with a powder-coat paint finish).  It will be a durable partner to this vine for years to come.  This type of heavy-duty construction would also be best for the ever popular trumpet vine, Campsis radicans, and even grapes.



A lighter weight vine gives you more options when you're selecting supports.  Here is Kintzley's Ghost honeysuckle vine, Lonicera reticulata 'Kintzley's Ghost', three ways:

This is another example of a heavy-duty arbor (at Denver Botanic Gardens);  it's a bit more traditional/formal  in style, and higher maintenance, too.

Same plant, also at Denver Botanic Gardens, on a highly decorative and lighter weight metal structure created by Denver's 23rd Avenue Sculpture Studio.

A lath-type trellis is also an option for a light weight vine.

If you want to keep your wall or fence free of plant material, but still want a vertical accent, consider a pillar type of structure:




Matching the appropriate support — both in strength and style — to the vine you wish to grow, is just one of the many details that will make your garden function beautifully.

Still plenty of beautiful, sunlit seeds to be seen on a chilly winter walk.

I always look forward to the New Year with anticipation.  It's time to renew and refresh, set goals and create action plans.

Here at The Art Garden I've changed things a bit with a new design template.  The look is still fairly clean and easy to read, but I've added a backdrop photo.  I'll change this out as the seasons progress (or on a whim, you never know).  Please let me know if you like it, or if it's a distraction from the "main event".  I've also added "share" buttons at the end of each post which I hope you'll enjoy using.



One of my gardening goals for 2013 is to add more plants to my home's interior spaces. The amaryllis (Hippeastrum spp.) pictured here was a mere bulb in a pot when it was gifted to me at Thanksgiving (thanks, Mary!). I kept it on my desk and watched it grow very quickly — like time-lapse film in real time!
 

What a joy to watch the big buds unfurl and have these monster blooms keep me company as I worked.  Now I'm looking forward to finding more plants that will tolerate low light, cool temps, and a small space.  Any ideas?


What are your garden goals for 2013?  Now's the time to dream, study, and plan ... and I'm here to help!

Again, best wishes to you for a fantastic 2013, and thanks for visiting The Art Garden.