Ideas & guides · Plan your yard
Decorating a Wide, Shallow Front Yard
The yard is wide but there is no room between the house and the sidewalk. Everything I put out ends up in one straight line and looks like a shop window. What else can I do?
Give up on depth and work in bays. A wide shallow lot has one long horizontal band to compose in, so the variable you have is spacing and height across it, not distance from the street. Break the frontage into three or four uneven groups with real gaps between them, vary the heights inside each group, and let the gaps do as much work as the pieces.
6 minute read.
You have a billboard, not a stage
Seventy-five feet of frontage against eighteen feet of setback is close to a four to one ratio. That is a billboard: a long, flat, shallow band that the street reads all at once rather than travelling into. Every technique built on foreground, middle distance and background is unavailable, because there is no middle distance.
What you get instead is scale across. Nobody with a deep lot can put four separate moments side by side and have all of them visible at the same time. You can. The wide shallow lot is the only shape where a viewer takes in the entire composition in one glance without moving, and that is worth building for rather than apologising for.
The failure is not that a wide yard looks empty. It is that a wide yard filled evenly looks like merchandising. Even spacing at even height across seventy-five feet is exactly what a store display does, and the eye reads it as inventory rather than as a scene.
This is the shape
Bays, drawn to scale
Wide Shallow, No Porch, 75 ft of frontage, Christmas Tree Forest at One nice thing. 6 spots filled, $242.09 of a $500 ceiling.
Three groups, uneven gaps, and the depths staggered by the few feet the lot allows. The star sits off centre because a centred star on a wide facade splits the frontage into two equal halves and neither of them then has anything to be.
Stagger the few feet you have
Eighteen feet of setback is not zero. Three feet of difference between one group and the next is enough to stop the row reading as a row, and it costs nothing but a decision about where to push the stakes in.
The reason this works out of proportion to its size is that overlap creates depth cues the brain trusts more than distance does. A piece that partly occludes another piece is read as being in front of it, and that is true whether the gap between them is thirty feet or three. Set the groups so that from the sidewalk one thing crosses slightly in front of another and the yard gains a dimension it does not physically have.
The corollary is that dead-square alignment throws the effect away. If every piece is the same distance from the house, nothing overlaps anything from any angle, and the whole frontage flattens into a single plane.
What goes where on a wide shallow lot
| Where | What goes there | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Off-centre, opposite the driveway | The tallest piece, up to about 10 ft | Balances the visual weight of the drive, and being off centre gives the rest of the frontage something to be arranged around. |
| Two or three groups across the rest | Mid-height pieces, 4 to 7 ft, unevenly spaced | Uneven spacing is what separates a scene from a display. Equal gaps read as stock. |
| Past the driveway | One piece on its own | The far side of a drive is usually left bare, which cuts the composition off at the tarmac. One thing over there and the yard reads as the full width. |
| The door | Something with real presence | With no porch there is no frame around the entry, so without a deliberate one the door disappears into a long flat wall. |
| The roofline | A continuous run, steady | On this shape the roof is the only long horizontal line you can draw, and it is what the oblique view down the block sees. |
No porch means you have to build the frame
A porch does something people rarely name: it puts a lit, roofed rectangle around the front door at eye level, which tells the street where the entrance is. Without one, a wide facade has no focal point at all and the door is just one more feature along a long wall.
The cheap fixes are a matched pair either side of the door, an arch over the walk where it meets the house, or a lit outline of the door frame itself. Any of them re-establishes a centre. Doing none of them is the single commonest reason a well-stocked wide yard still looks unfinished.
It matters more here than on any other shape because there is no depth to create hierarchy with. On a deep lot the eye finds the entrance by travelling toward it. On this one, if nothing marks the door, nothing marks the door.
The driveway is a third of your frontage
On a typical lot of this shape the drive eats twenty to twenty-five feet of the seventy-five, and it is the first thing headlights hit coming down the street. Treating it as a gap in the yard is what leaves the composition lopsided.
Two things help. Put weight on the far side of it so the display spans the whole frontage rather than stopping at the tarmac. And light the edge where drive meets lawn, which draws a line the eye can follow instead of a dark void in the middle of the picture.
What not to do is stand anything in the backing path. If your walk comes off the drive, the flanking pieces beside it are exactly where a reversing car sweeps. Every year somebody reverses over a light-up reindeer, and it is always one that was placed on the day it arrived rather than measured.
The straight-on view is the one everybody plans for and the least common one in practice. Most people see a wide house at an oblique angle from thirty or forty yards along the street, where the frontage compresses and the pieces stack up against each other. Walk down there and look back. A composition that reads as three groups from the front often reads as one solid mass from the side, and the fix is usually to widen one gap rather than to add anything.
Where this usually goes wrong
One flat row parallel to the house
The default arrangement on this shape and the one that turns a yard into a store display. Stagger the depths by even three feet and break the frontage into uneven groups, and the same pieces read completely differently.
Leaving the far side of the driveway bare
The drive takes about a third of the frontage. If nothing sits beyond it the display stops at the tarmac and the yard looks half-decorated from the street, however much is on the near side.
No frame around the door
With no porch there is nothing marking the entrance, so on a long flat facade the door vanishes. A pair either side, an arch, or a lit door surround gives the composition a centre it otherwise has to do without.
The wide shallow lot is one of the ten shapes on this site, with the bays already spaced, the star placed off the drive and every spot capped to what the eighteen foot setback can actually carry.
Plans drawn for this shape
Every one of these is the same Wide Shallow, No Porch at 75′ by 18′, with 9 spots to fill. The map, the yard notes and the do-it-yourself version are free on all of them.
Halloween: Alien Invasion · Cryptid Crossing · The Old Cemetery · Spiders, Spiders, Spiders · Toxic Waste · Witch's Brew · Zombies
Christmas: Christmas Tree Forest · Classic White Christmas · The North Pole · Nutcrackers · Reindeer Pen · Santa's Workshop · Under The Tree · Vintage Christmas · Winter Wonderland
Valentine's Day: Cupid's Bow · Lace Valentine's Day · Sparkle Hearts
Easter and Spring: Easter Bunny Visit · Eggs, Eggs Everywhere · Spring Flowers
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