Houston Landscape Design with French Elements

A couple by the name of Claire and Dan Boyles commissioned Exterior Worlds to create a Houston landscape design based upon French themes and forms. The Boyles home was built in Colonial French style, with Claire having been very involved in the planning and development of its architecture. She wanted to make the surrounding property appear as those a portion of France had been lifted out of Europe and integrated into the indigenous forms and vegetation of the Houston landscape.

This design was not technically a formal French country garden. Instead, it used the essential elements of this style to transform the immediate Houston landscape around the home into the symmetry, color, and sense of formality associated with this French aesthetics. One of the more notable features we used to accomplish this was a custom swimming pool, fashioned according to the principles of linearity, complimentary right angles, and a luxury spa and pool fountain. We also added French pottery in various locations around the patio to balance the stonework against the look and structure of the home.

We then planted a formal garden parallel to the linear movement pool to reflect its. Similar to larger French country gardens, this garden is bordered by sheered bushes and emphasizes straight lines, angles, and symmetry. Its most distinguishing feature is that it consists entirely of various shades of green, which supports the feeling of a French estate embedded in an exclusive and private portion of the HOUSTON LANDSCAPE.

Just around the corner from the home’s back entrance stand a double-door entrance to the master bedroom. It is here that we built the Boyles a small patio to use as a private seating area. We deviated slightly from the strict linearity and symmetry of adjoining elements by adding pavers that ran out like steps from the patio into the grass. We planted boxwood hedges around the patio, which are common to French country garden design and further contribute to the sense of an Old World morning garden setting.

To further accentuate the patio, we added pavers that ran like steps from the seating area into the grass. We also planted rosemary and mondo as ground cover in the spaces between the patio, the corner of the house, and the back wall that borders this portion of the yard.

We then landscaped the front of the home with a grand sense of entrance by building a stone walkway that ran from the sidewalk to the front of the house, and then diverged in right angles to run parallel to the covered front porch. We also added a small parterre garden to the left side of the porch to mirror the home’s French colonial design

French country garden design is traditionally viewed as a very formal style intended to completely fill the entirety of a vast estate. The genius of the Boyles project lay not in strict adherence to tradition, but rather in adapting its basic principles to the architecture of the home and the local topography of the surrounding HOUSTON LANDSCAPE.

For more the 20 years Exterior Worlds has specialized in servicing many of Houston's fine neighborhoods.