How your home looks to a prospective buyer – what’s known as curb appeal – is worthy of consideration even if your home is not currently on the market. Exterior stone treatments, including landscaping and the materials used for your home’s roof and exterior walls can add real value to your home and making returning to it each day a pleasure.
One way to get big aesthetic bang for your buck is to incorporate natural stone treatments on the exterior of your house. Whether you are building a home from scratch with custom features or renovating to spruce up your older home’s appearance, natural stone can instantly add architectural and visual appeal. Although exterior stone products are readily available in engineered materials that weigh next to nothing and are easy to apply, you won’t be sorry by opting for true stone. A natural stone veneer is just as easy to install and it adds the kind of texture and dimensional charm that simply cannot be manufactured. Additionally, natural limestone, sandstone, marble and granite comes in a variety of profiles, colours, and cuts, so you can get exactly the look you envision for the outside of your home.
Take a look at how exterior stone is used in the following design schemes:
For a larger contemporary bungalow, ranch-style or split-level home, cladding exterior walls with horizontal lines of textured stone is a fashionable treatment reminiscent of early modernists such as Frank Lloyd Wright. The style is at its most striking framed by vegetation and trees.
Timber framed homes can generally accommodate a mix of exterior surface treatments. The colour and texture of natural stone complements the graininess of wooden beams and timbers for a rustic and warmly inviting look. Natural stone can also be used as a base or partial cladding for columns, or around a front entryway.
American craftsman style homes originated in the first years of the 20th century in Southern California and are distinctively vertical in orientation with gables, porches and other exterior details. In modern iterations, many of those features can be highlighted in natural stone cladding in concert with other surfaces such as stucco and brick.
Tuscany is a region of Italy famed for its ancient masonry and stonework. Even the humblest stone cottage has an integrity and grace that comes from using natural materials with time-honoured techniques and craftsmanship. Unrefined or roughly chiselled stones are frequently mismatched for this style, with a mix of colours and rockwall stone types that form textured patterns.
Even the humble Cape Cod style home can benefit from an exterior stone treatment in lieu of, or in addition to, shakes, shingles or ship-lapped boards. Rockwall is a popular choice for adding a stone cottage type feel to this unadorned architectural classic.
Adding a stone exterior treatment lends itself well to both contemporary and heritage style architecture. Natural stone veneer can be used as the primary material on a façade, or used more sparingly to add sophisticated details to the outside of the building alongside stucco, brick veneers or other siding products. So you don’t necessarily have to cover your entire house with stone – less can be more when you add a natural stone treatment to the walls around an entryway, or clad only the lower half of an exterior wall. Stone can also be used to unify the main house with adjacent buildings such as a garage or landscaping features like walls and canopies.
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