Please post your gardening zone and/or approximate location. (Helps with types of plants to suggest)

I think the zone is 7 and I'm in Parksville, B.C. which is middle Vancouver Island.

I suggest that you make that front yard a nice garden of native plants. I don't know where you are located, but a local landscape architect should be able to design something that you plant. In the midwest we have master gardeners who will answer questions about what to plant. If you are willing, you could submit your problem to Garden Gate. Every issue they show a yard that they re-worked. One in my neighborhood was in a recent issue and it looks very nice.

Wow! That looks great. Thank you.

The Nootka cypress in the above cartoon will be out over the pavement in a few years. If you do not have a history of caring for a yard full of plantings you might want to take it easy at first, maybe instead keep most of the lawn - which you can probably renovate fairly easily rather than replace - unless you really just do not like summer dormant lawns. Which it sounds like the utility there may be effectively mandating, by limiting water use. Otherwise a successful approach might be to cut way back on the turf area in the back but keep most of it in the front, with something simple like a group of boulders combined with a single, clumping habit specimen plant - bamboo would be perfect but it likes water - near the center of the lawn where it will be the most effective visually. And with no plantings on the sides or at the ends, where they might affect vehicle access or sight lines while driving.

Unless they are required by community rules I would also remove the row of shade trees across the front as for starters they throw the bed out of balance visually. And I certainly wouldn't replace them with the purple Norway maples shown in the cartoon, with their large eventual size, weedy seedlings, tendency to kill everything underneath and their heavy aphid drip - which is already well underway this year in our region.

I'm in BC too, lower mainland/Fraser Valley. Just a heads-up, as you're researching plants double any mature sizes listed. Everything grows at least twice as big as average out here :)

Thanks, Lindsey.