Thuja plicata,pinus (hillside gold),and black gum tupelo will make a fine screen for you. All season evergreen, winter and fall color extravaganza. Also nesting for birds and fod.

Check with your neighbor first, maybe they were going to plant to screen your house.

If you plant something 2-1/2 times the height of that shrub in pic#2, will that block the view of the horizon from your first floor windows?

Do you have room at the edge of your property for a small grove of not too big evergreens? Extending the grouping of trees in pic#2 (under the window blind) with more than one type of shrub/tree would look fine, imo. Maybe include some flowering shrubs like mountain laurel.

Gorgeous view, you have...hope your new neighbors are congenial.

Given that plastic playhouse in your own yard, it's a good illustration that we are all a little subjective in what we are willing to look at and what we aren't :-). The moral of the whole view situation is really that if you don't own it, you can't control it. And the house doesn't look as if it will be altogether unattractive; better than, say, a cement plant, which is going into a residential neighbourhood near me.

All that said, if it were mine I'd probably want to screen a bit for privacy even if I could bear the loss of the pristine view. You might want to place evergreens strategically so that they block views into and out of their windows/your windows, and use deciduous trees to provide general coverage.

Willows can run their roots good and far, so might survive just fine, but they're brittle so a windy situation isn't good near a structure (read up in the trees forum on willows). A good reason to use willows is that you like them - a key element of screening is to put something that you like looking at to divert your eye from what you don't want to see - sometimes you don't even have to block all of what you don't like if you distract the eye effectively enough.

KarinL

LOL on the plastic playhouse. I was thinking I could get a few more and build a whole village to block the new construction!

Actually, we have plans dreams for a quarter circle-shaped patio where the playhouse is. You can't see from the picture, but there is an L shaped addition onto the house that runs straight out on the left side of the picture, so we'd like to put a patio that fills in that section of yard defined by the L of the house walls. I'd love to ring the backside of that patio with a sitting wall, and was thinking that if we planted behind the wall with some fairly tall shrubs, we'd create sort of a little private enclave on the patio and succeed in blocking the entire house from our breakfast room windows (the shot of the plastic playhouse). Still doesn't solve the problem of the 2nd floor or privacy for the rest of the yard though.

And yes, I know I should be grateful - at least it's only one house (and quite a nice one at that) instead of a row of townhomes or something (a cement plant, yikes!). But we had friends who also made an offer on the property - they offered more money and an agreement not to build for 2 years, and when they did build, they were going to use her sister as an architect - she specializes in "green" houses and had planned to nestle a small one-story susanka-type home farther down into the hillside. I suspect the sellers picked this offer over theirs for two reasons - 1) obviously the guy is loaded and may have offered cash or been in a better financing position than my young-couple friends, and 2) this guy did not have his own buyer's realtor, meaning the selling realtor got the entire commission. If I had to guess, I'm betting the realtor steered the seller hard toward this offer for that reason alone.

OK, enough of my bitterness and on with the useful suggestions. What do you all think of Norway spruce? We had a line of them screening our last house's yard from the road and they were beautiful. Of course, our last house was in a valley in a flood zone and had the best soil ever. Up here it's pretty clay-ey and the exposure is rough. We have a line of white pines and some kind of spruce or fir (even the tree guys aren't sure, but I don't think they're norways) that the previous owners planted. They're dying off one by one - the spruce/fir especially are looking bad - some kind of mite maybe was the last guy's guess. I obviously don't want to sink big bucks into planting a ton of trees just to see them croak.

You know, once the roofing goes on, and the house is painted...it might not be so "sore thumb obvious." Particularly if they roof with dark shingles. Have you considered living with it and seeing how much it REALLY bothers you?

Otherwise...here in zone 7b I'd be suggesting a mixed border with Thuja plicata 'Green Giant' as the primary tall plant...with some magnolia grandifloras for good measure...but I've NO idea what will grow well on the "cold side of zone 6." Get thee to a good local nursery and ask for suggestions.

I still think it may not be so distressing once you aren't looking at raw lumber.

melanie

Also, remember that what usually irritates people is the looking at the neighbor's windows because one imagines other people looking back at you. Screening where the windows are is usually enough to "break up" the outline of the house and give you back your feeling of privacy.

Good luck! (from Jean, whose neighbors on both sides are 10' away!)

Mine is an analysis of the three photographs offered to illustrate the view to be saved. The first photo is probably the view in question: a view above the mist shrouded trees to the horizon and who wouldn't want to wake in the morning to that? The other two pictures point the camera towards where people are living and are less romantic, more real (karin points to the obvious that we often deny). Can the two coexist?

To find out how tall your screen needs to be and exactly where it needs to be positioned, have someone with a long lightweight stick, and a ladder if necessary, stand out there and hold it up while you look at it from various viewpoints. Once you know where and how tall, you can determine which trees would do the job most efficiently.

I suppose if it's too tall to use a stick, a helium ballon on a long string could work, too. Then measure how much string you had to let out.

A helium balloon on a string Jo? Isn't helium the stuff that makes you laugh like a chipmunk? The only way that anyone will have total control of a view is to take a photograph, have it enlarged and pin it to the wall. Don't look out the window. Karin drew attention to the playhouse which is so astute she probably doesn't even realise it as being a symbol of change. I guess it does depend on how much string you are prepared to let out.

Yes, it is, and we still do that at parties. The balloon thing just hit me as I was typing, and wondering what you would do if you didn't have a stick long enough. It seemed like a good idea at the time, LOL.

The house under construction is pretty large, but if I'm not mistaken, it's down near the bottom of the view and could probably be screened out.

I noticed the playhouse, too. Not exactly decorative. I never had kids, and when I married a man with two pre-adolescents, the amount of plastic stuff in the house really gave me the heebie jeebies.

I wonder if the only operative word is screening, or includes the idea of framing. I don't think it would be such a problem to see a rooftop or something among the trees (of course, I understand your preference for things to have remained pristine).

Can someone with more design savvy than I have, maybe deal further with the idea of perspective and drawing the eye. If you draw the eye only to the foreground (and only to distract from the other house) , you might actually quit looking at your long view. But if the neighboring house was just sort of visible among some leafy treetops, that would not seem bad and your eye would skip over it. So an intriguing idea to me is whether a strategically placed landscape "object"--a treetop or whatever--could connect you to the long view better, and independently of whether it actually blocks the house.

Secondly, there will be a difference in what you need to do to make your own back yard comfortable for humans, vs. trying to block the big house specifically. Smaller trees and shrubs and plantings will likely be more comfortable around a patio or other seating area, to give some security and enclosure, than towering evergreens. You will have the view from the ground, along with the view from the higher windows, to try to think about together.

I don't know whether you want to work from the house outward before you totally set up a perimeter "barrier" that you may not need, plus think about other uses for plant (tree) material for other specific purposes (e.g., depending on the orientation, you might plant something that blocks the house but is not in the right place to provide needed shade).

It gets back to some of the other comments about, other than looking out the window at the view, you would think about what all you want to do in your yard so as to not overemphasize one problem at the expense of other things you can enjoy.

It is certainly an interesting project.