Your home’s driveway can be seen as an extension of your personality. With more and more intricate brick patterns, coloured shingles, ornate paving and topiary cropping up from street to street, now is the time to give your driveway a revamp.
Knowing where to start can be daunting – if you’ve had a tarmacked drive until now, but want to change to bricks instead, how do you know which colour, pattern, and texture to choose?
In this article, we’ll be looking at 20 affordable driveway designs to inspire you. We examine:
- Design options
- Materials used
- Key features
- Unique selling points
Our guide will give you options to choose from, whether your driveway is sweeping or modest.
Topics
Driveway Designs
1 – Keep To a Traditional Pattern
If you’re not sure whether you want a fancy driveway and are worried about picking something you’ll tire of in a few years’ time, then opting for a tried-and-true design is a great way to go.
Keep things simple by repeating the same pattern up and down your driveway in a brick that complements the colour of your home’s stone or roof. Looking great on both large- and small-scale driveways, this simple look can help to open up a small driveway by leaving it clutter- and fuss-free, while larger driveways can benefit from the lower installation price that comes with simple patterns.
2 – Add Some Texture with Gravel or Shingle
Depending on the style of your house, tarmac or concrete might not be in keeping with the overall aesthetic. In this case, you’ll want to look for something complementary to your home’s exterior – and pea gravel (sometimes called shingle) might be just the thing for you.
Gravel comes in a variety of shapes, textures, and colours so you can adapt it to your desired look, be that a chunky and rocky driveway or something more even and smooth. Needing a little bit more attention than other driveway materials, you’ll want to rake the shingle now and again to keep it looking neat and tidy.
3 – Mark It Out with Clever Colour-Blocking Paving
If you have a driveway that’s connected to your home’s front door, you may want to create a sense of separation between the two. This can help cars to stay in their lane when they come to park while ensuring there’s enough room to walk up to your house with bulkier things in tow, such as a pushchair.
This can be done by simply interchanging a row of paving slabs with a tonal colour, helping to mark out areas and add a bit of interest to what would otherwise be an area of the same colour.
4 – Experiment and Mix Your Stones
If your home’s exterior already has some mismatched brickwork going on, why not extend that out into your driveway’s design? The key here is to use colours that are tonal to one another – so when choosing the driveway paving, make sure the colours compliment each other by being from the same cool-toned or warm-toned families.
It’s also good to consider how colours will change or fade over time with weathering and as a result of wear and tear, which can give a lived-in effect to the driveway.
5 – Consider Complimentary Features
If you don’t have too much room outside of the front of your house to play with, getting creative is the best way to maximise what space you do have. Keeping things simple with a tarmacked drive can add a sense of simplicity, being uncluttered and sleek in appearance.
You can then experiment with additional features – such as steps up to your front door, small paved borders, or landscaped areas to the side of your driveway to balance out the urban and natural elements.
6 – No Cars? No Problem!
If your home hasn’t got a garage, or you have no need for a driveway, then you can give the outdoor space a complete overhaul and make it into whatever you want.
Opening up the area to give way to more green space can be a great way to inject some mood-boosting endorphins into the front of your home, giving wildlife a welcome space to flock to – and giving you something wonderful to look at through your window when winged creatures find their way to your home!
7 – Reimagine Driveway Borders
Borders can come in all shapes and sizes – but if you really want to add some interest and depth to the design of your driveway, you can look to add dug out borders instead, ready to be filled with whatever you want to inject some personality to the front of your home.
Why not experiment with some decorative shrubs or topiary to give the urban space a natural flourish? Add in some solar-powered lights to make sure when you arrive home at night you know exactly where to drive – and where not to! Finishing off the border with a thin shingle top layer in the same tone as your driveway adds that final touch of cohesion.
8 – Let Your Creativity Run Wild
Just because everyone else on your road has a uniform, plain driveway doesn’t mean you have to follow suit. Feel free to switch up the everyday look in favour of something different – and in this case, we’re talking about using alternating colours of bricks to make a geometric design within your driveway.
This is easier than it may seem, as the bricks are all cut to size, so all you need to focus on is placing the right colour down in your chosen sequence. For a final flourish, you can opt for some brightly coloured blooms to liven up the edge of your driveway, too.
9 – Maximise Your Home’s Privacy
Adding a gate to the front of your home is a great bit of added security – but it can also be an aesthetically-enhancing addition to your driveway. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to gates, so you can really let your creativity run wild if you want to.
From automatic to manual openings and wood to metal; there’s a whole host of options when it comes to a driveway gate – you simply need to pick what’s right for you. If you’d appreciate the extra security, but don’t want the hassle of getting out of your car to open the gate when you get back at night, opting for a gate sensor could be the way to go.
10 – Consider Quirky Lawn Placement
Just because you have a narrow driveway doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with it. Bring some colour into your palette by allowing the room for a strip of grass to run up your driveway – just remember it’s another spot to mow in the warmer months!
If you don’t fancy the upkeep of a strip of turf, you can opt for a shingle or gravel patch instead – be sure to line the soil with a weed-repellant material first to make your maintenance a little easier over the years to come.
11 – Embrace the Contrast
Dark-toned brickwork to the house, warm-toned wood to the garage door – what colour do you pick for your driveway? The answer is whatever you want – as shown in this photo example above.
This is another way of using gravel to make a great impact. Gravel or shingle mixes are usually made up of lots of different colours added together, making them the perfect material for areas where you mightn’t want one wash of colour, or where something like a sharp and sleek tarmac might look out of place when considering the surrounding environment and colour schemes.
12 – Complement Your Property with Likeminded Designs
Following the architectural style of your property can be a great way of making a bold statement when it comes to your home’s driveway. Taking tonal colour influences from your house creates a cohesive appearance, and gives the impression that the match was planned all along – even when it might not have been.
In this example, the owner has matched the colour of the house’s render to the predominant colour of the driveway material and has picked out a car space in the same grey-black that’s used as an accent colour on the house itself, generating a sleek overall appearance.
13 – Focus On Naturally-Occurring Features
Not every driveway needs to make a bold statement – especially if other features frame the space and do all the talking for you. If you have a large tree, flowerbed or other elements of your front garden that you want to highlight, then opting for a fuss-free driveway is the way to go.
This way, you can keep the focus where you want it, instead of taking away from the naturally-occurring features – and what’s more, it’ll probably end up being more cost-effective as prices are lower for more simple designs.
14 – Make a Statement with Grand Topiary
As the antithesis to our last suggestion, if your space allows, you can really go all out on your driveway design and create a circular island full of shaped topiary to add a sense of grandeur and character to your property.
Requiring considerably more landscaping maintenance than a standard driveway, this look is for those wanting to make an impact – and those who have the time and willingness to keep it in tip-top condition.
15 – Stand Out With Circular Paving
If you’re not wanting to obstruct your driveway with some green space, but still want to make your area a little different than simply just being paved in a standard way, why not experiment with a fun paved design instead?
In this example, we can see a standard brick-lain driveway being broken up with a series of concentric circles. This installation will be considerably more than a standard driveway as you’ll have to account for the extra time in cutting and laying curved-edge bricks, but if you have the means and want to make a subtle statement, this is a great way to go without compromising your usable space.
16 – Utilise Existing Green Borders
Driveways can quickly become an all-consuming feature, and take over the front of your house.
Keeping a sense of separation for a walkway to your front door, a clear route to your garage, and then an open space for some greenery can ensure that you make the most of your space, optimising it for multiple uses – and helping to appeal to homebuyers, too.
17 – Keep It Seamless With an Unassuming Finish
If you truly want to embrace the modernity of your property’s exterior, then carrying on the design theme down to the driveway is a great way to go. Pairing futuristic architecture with a sleek concrete driveway helps to keep the visual story cohesive, while not taking away from the impactful house exterior.
With houses like these, it can be easy to do too much and compete for the eye’s attention – but keeping it simple and sleek with all-over colour and finish can help to complete your home’s kerb appeal.
18 – Red Is the New Black
When you think of driveways, you might automatically think of a dark black or grey expanse, but they aren’t the only colours available to you. For properties with red brick or sandstone, choosing a warmer tone can be more complementary to the overall aesthetic.
To get this right, you’ll want to pick a tonal shade matching your home’s exterior and dial it down a few notches so that it isn’t a stark contrast, but a subtle continuation of your home. In this example, the owner has used a composite driveway in a salmon shade, toning in with the reddish shades of their home.
19 – Simplicity is Always in Style
If you don’t want to take things too far and mark your personality outside of your home for all to see, then opting for a tried-and-true tarmac can be a great solution for something evergreen and able to suit any homeowner’s tastes.
For smaller properties, this can be a good way of ensuring the driveway doesn’t overpower the rest of the house, as well as saving you from spending excessive amounts of money on an area that mightn’t add too much value to your home when you come to sell up.
20 – Line It up With Embedded Sleek Borders
Having an all-over colour or material for your driveway doesn’t restrict you from having some fun with it. You can easily mark out grids or boundaries within your driveway by creating ridges while your ground is setting.
This can be a fun way of including borders so that cars know their boundaries, or just simply adding a design element to your driveway to add some interest to the otherwise plain appearance. These can also have a functional use as they can be channels for rainwater to drain away if your driveway is sloping.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Much Does a Driveway Cost?
How Do I Find a Driveway Contractor?
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Click To Get QuotesWhat is the Cheapest Material for Driveways?
When it comes to imprinted or patterned concrete driveways, as well as resin bound or resin bonded driveways, they tend to be more expensive. It’s worth bearing that in mind when it comes to approaching your budget if you have your sights set on a more bespoke design.