How to Design a Large Side Yard With Purpose and Style

When side yards rival the house in scale, the default—turf grass or arboretum—wastes potential. Instead, devise a distinct design theme: use mature trees and shrubs, emphasize distant vistas, create foreground vignettes with plants, art, and furnishings. Think big, go bold, plan thoughtfully.

Intimate Grandeur

Two details make this grand lawn human-scaled. Foreground: deep planting beds mirrored by low boxwood hedging create a welcoming threshold that slows pedestrians. Distance: a curvaceous arbor acts as a doorway to a hidden garden, its placement successful because the lawn continues beneath like a path, while side plantings prevent shortcutting.

Andrew Renn

Modern Linear Sensibility

Lawn, path, planting bed, and fence align in parallel—a treatment that could feel severe until softened: bluestone walkway bands the lawn; limbed-up trees planted hedge-like; clipped boxwood balls echo tree forms; natural cedar fencing with horizontal boards silhouettes sculptural trees, reinforcing contemporary lines.

Randy Thueme Design Inc. - Landscape Architecture

Woodland Journey

A mature shade tree creates a canopy, filtering sunlight into dappled patterns on ferns and hostas—a distinct sense of separateness. A crushed stone meandering path simplifies navigation and maintenance (wheeled carts welcome).

Re-imagined

Circular Connection

A rounded crushed-stone "carpet" with block edging and flagstone path links large side and front yards. Two turquoise Adirondack chairs and a side table create a front-porch-like bonus seating area—attractive and neighbor-friendly.

Westover Landscape Design, Inc.

Proportional Drama

This side yard's width equals the architecture's height—a classic design technique. Longer than wide, it divides into thirds: a colorful bed against the house (permanent plantings near structure, seasonal at edge); a graphic central walkway of 30-inch-square pavers with magnetic rhythmic lines leading to a seating destination; an allée of trees at the far edge, soon to visually balance the architecture and provide enclosure.

Narofsky Architecture + ways2design

Side Meadow

The lawn yields to a prairie-inspired meadow—"drifts of naturalistic plantings" massed in irregular rows tiered by height. Tall feather reed grass (Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster') catches morning light; Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium purpureum 'Atropurpureum') adds lavender domes; unstructured grasses continue foreground. A distant tall arbor beckons exploration.

The Garden Consultants, Inc.

Private Courtyard Luxury

A low wall encloses a sophisticated private courtyard with stone-banded "patterned carpet" flooring. Clipped boxwood "baseboards" connect horizontal and vertical planes. Minimalist furnishings—two chaises with lemon-yellow pillows—balance a distant oval-clipped tree and foreground stainless steel orb. A jewel box revealing treasures.

AMS Landscape Design Studios, Inc.

Simple Lawn Band

Sometimes simplest wins: a wide lawn band (six-plus feet) connects two shade gardens. The vast grassy swath occupies "negative" space, balancing "positive" mature shade trees flanking the central path.

Woodburn & Company Landscape Architecture, LLC