I would be thinking a complete redo is in order. The goal for enhancing your house face and especially entrance, should not be to take the most interesting things and cover them up with a green barricade, which is what the shrubs are acting as. It could be much nicer if your home looked more inviting. Widening the walk, and steps would help a lot. the picture could stand a couple of small tree whose canopy conceals some of the roof. One I've shown. Another could go at the far left corner (not shown.)

Absolutely would remove the shrubs. I don';t know why, but it is hard for most people to just cut down and throw away perfectly healthy shrubs, it is for me too. But your home will look immediately better, and less work to constantly prune and shape the shrubs. It is the same feeling for trees. I see horrible trees, half dead or totally covering a house, too close or whatever, and people just feel awful cutting a tree down. !

Yardvaark, we love it! Thank you so much for the suggestion. I don't have the vision for this kind of thing so this is sooooo helpful.

I'd like to compliment you on your lawn! Wow! Makes me want to just lay down on that luscious greenness! :-))

Post a photo when you get rid of those plants and open things up! Would love to see the final result!

Suzi

Thanks, desertdance! We have the previous homeowner to thank for the lawn. We are hoping to keep it looking just as nice. I'll post a pic if this is something we can do this summer!

I wouldn't plant any matching pairs or straight lines of shrubs in front of this place as the house itself is not geometrically symmetric all the way across, due to the overhang and the smaller room(s) at the one end. And I would definitely discontinue the formal shearing of the shrubs, as that also does not match the design of the house.

If you do convert to the (mostly) informal planting shown in the one post here the beds should have flowing shapes to go along with the planting style.

A good primer, written in the style of an essay or magazine article is the small, inexpensive - yet utterly classic - book on the subject Garden Design Illustrated by John and Carol Grant. Reprinted many times but not recently, you will probably have to get it off the internet if interested.