Well your long flat uninteruppted roof line makes it easy to look right over the front door, so I think you already know the answer to your question. Some other ideas: Painting the front door a brighter color would make it stand out also Put matching evergreen shrubs on either side of the door. Can't tell from your photo if there is any room or not. If no open ground then use pots. Line the stoop with a different type of material, like brick to stand out from the foundation.

My suggestions are to mainly to simplify and embolden... Remove the low-starting, wide spreading limbs off of the two front trees. Create a bed of single variety plants below those trees. Increase the bed size at the left corner of the house and move the small tree in it farther away from the house. Increase the foundation bed front-to-back depth where possible (to the 6' range or greater.) Paint the lower portion of the power pole in some interesting scheme. Add an island with small tree in front of the breezeway area. Remove the pyramidal shaped plants flanking front door and replace with beds of annual color. Underscore the left set of windows with the existing shrubs, but don't let them extend beyond the end of house. Underscore the bay window with a single planting that will not obscure the window lower portions. Widen the front walk. Does not need to be exact same material. Anything compatible will do. Same material could form cheekwall at single step. Or get rid of that single step. It does not look needed. (Can't tell if existing bricks are laid OK, but the weeds growing in them should be sprayed out for an improved appearance. A canopy or awning of some type above the stoop would make the house face much more interesting. PS: Thanks for putting on decent pictures ... one of the extremely few times I have not wished for better!

Those are the best looking garage doors that anyone has brought to the forum in quite some time. The house is nice looking, too. The forum is a place where you can get help with landscape design and related issues, but you must keep in mind that is has limitations. For one, if the conversation is too wide spread -- about all areas of a large yard, for example -- it can quickly become confusing. It's best to focus on one area for a given thread ... a front yard, for example. It's best to work through that and then move on to other areas with new threads. And giving "help" means giving you assistance. You will still have work to do in converting any advice you get, whether it be verbal or graphic, into a workable PLAN. Either you must do it, or you must hire a landscape designer or architect to do it. But you really can't do landscape work, at least in any well organized, logical manner, without a plan on paper. On a larger than average property, a plan would be especially necessary if you mean to avoid waste and mistakes. Given that your are probably going to reside at the property for many years and will surely want to create a property as nice as the home, I highly recommend that you hire a landscape designer to work out all of the issues that you'll face while planning a quality landscape ... especially if you're not able to visualize things easily. Meanwhile, you can work on sorting through your thoughts on the project and on a direction to take the design. I'd suggest you start with the front yard. In order to do that you'll need to supply better pictures. In taking them what's important is not just what's directly in front of the house, but in an area the surrounds the house about 20' - 30' out, including the ends. Also, when taking pictures for those who can't personally visit the site, it's best if the camera is lined up with the center of the scene. For a given scene the camera must stay in one location and only pivot for each picture. Snap from left to right while taking slightly overlapping pictures and post them all, not a panorama made from them. That's a starting point. Another picture that is usually important to show is one of the front of the house as one sees it from a distance, showing how it fits in with the neighborhood. since you probably have a very large front yard, you might show it from where you see the house upon entering the property. If that's too far away, maybe as you're seeing it from a hundred or more feet away. Hard to be too exact without knowing what you're working with. You might also include a view from Google Satellite if that will help explain the overall layout.

Doug - would love to see if you have any ideas for the back yard? It is huge! I want to keep the swing set and bird feeder but the tree is going and the fence is to be replaced. I would love some place for a small vegetable garden (last year, I put some plants where the retaining wall is). Any thoughts?