Dior’s garden at the Villa Les Rhumbs in Granville in Normandy, France.

Musee Christain Dior Collection, Granville

An afternoon dress in pale blue organdie, embroidered with pink and blue forget-me-nots, was part of Dior’s spring-summer 1953 haute couture collection, Tulipe line.

Musee Christian Dior Collection, Granville

When it was time to create a new collection, Christian Dior had a ritual: He went to his garden and sat down among the flowers.

Fashion historian Florence Muller gathered drawings, photographs and paintings by Manet, Monet, Renoir and others for an exhibition on Dior and Impressionism, at the Dior Museum in Granville, the designer’s hometown. Granville is a dreary little seaside town in Normandy, France, which these days is festooned with photos of roses in celebration of its native son.

Muller says the garden ritual served Dior from 1947, when he famously invented what was dubbed the New Look, until he died 10 years later, at age 52. An old photograph shows Dior, pudgy and bald (one wag said he “looked as if he were made of pink marzipan”), in his garden, finding inspiration. You can see him in real concentration, sitting at a little table, with a pond behind him — he’s thinking and drawing, and creating.

“Each season he had to invent so many dresses, perhaps that’s why he’s holding his head,” says Muller. “It’s not so easy, you know, the work of a grand couturier.”

As a teenager, Dior helped his mother design the garden at their pink house, up a winding seaside road in Granville.

Susan Stamberg/NPR

When he was 15, Christian Dior helped his mother design their pretty garden in Granville. Up a winding seaside road, the Diors’ pink house is a modest one.

“It’s not a very important house,” says Brigitte Richard, chief curator of the Dior Museum. “In fact, it’s a house of a bourgeois family settled in Granville.”

Dior’s bourgeois father was a fertilizer manufacturer. (Handy, for gardening!)

Like the designer, the artists of Impressionism were also inspired by flowers. Muller picked two photos to make the point.

“You have here the idea of painters in their garden,” she explains. “Like Monet, of course, [a famous example of a] garden created by an artist. And on the left side, Christian Dior with his gardens that were also creations designed by him.”

Dior stands in his gardens, in a suit and tie. Monet, in suspenders and soft hat, looks more relaxed. But both were flower lovers: Monet put gardens on his canvases; Dior put them on women. Dress collections named for flowers; fabrics patterned with roses, lily of the valley (his lucky flower, he said), embroidered bouquets; full, full, skirts that swirl like petals.

Christian Dior (left) poses in the garden at La Colle Noire, his home in Montauroux, in a photograph taken by Lord Snowdon. Claude Monet (right) stands beside his pond of water lilies in a 1905 photograph by Jacques-Ernest Bulloz.

Camera Press/Gamma/RMN-Grand Palais

“Ha!” said Chanel, just a bit competitively. “Dior doesn’t dress women. He upholsters them.”

Berthe Morisot’s 1890 watercolor Tulips.

Musee Marmottan Monet

A strapless gown with a gauzy white skirt, once worn by Sarah Jessica Parker, is placed near a Degas ballet class. John Galliano designed the dress — he did the Dior line from the late 1990s to 2011. Other Dior designers include Yves St. Laurent, and these days Raf Simons.

Linking the clothes to Impressionism, a dreary landscape by the young Monet hangs near a dowdy 1956 Dior. Tulips — a watercolor by Berthe Morisot — echoes a brighter Dior, from 1956.

The New Look that put Dior on the fashion map in 1947 — tiny waists, huge skirts, rounded shoulders — made a powerful statement, after all the deprivations of World War II. With his New Look, Dior was saying a new day had dawned.

“It was very important because it was a symbol of a return to prosperity — the beauty of life, you know,” Muller says. It was the “return to luxurious things. … It was like a fairy tale again.”

“Dior and Impressionism” continues the fairy tale, with paintings and clothes, at the Dior Museum in Granville. The show ends Sunday.

The driveway that came with the 1921 Craftsman-style house that David Ulick bought five years ago was the original concrete one, marred by cracks and with tree roots starting to break through.

“I didn’t like the driveway,” said Ulick, of Pasadena, Calif. “I wanted something a little bit nicer.”

He looked through books and drove through the Craftsman-rich neighborhoods of Pasadena to get ideas before deciding on a concrete drive with an antique finish, accented with reclaimed red bricks from the 1920s.

“I wanted this to look like the original driveway, an original, nice driveway, and using used bricks gives it a nice old-fashioned look,” Ulick said.

“It really makes it a grand entrance for the house,” he added, noting the brick walkway up one side. “I figured I’d treat the Craftsman the way it deserves to be treated, and maintain its design style and heritage.”

While a driveway may still be a utilitarian afterthought for many homeowners, others like Ulick are adding some serious curb appeal to their homes by moving beyond basic options like grass or gravel, asphalt or concrete.

“The driveway is commonly overlooked,” conceded Michael Keenan, an adjunct assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota. “Driveways are not cheap necessarily, but they are completely functional and necessary if you have a car and a garage.”

Doing up the driveway, Keenan said, is a chance to “celebrate the function because it is a piece of the property you do use every day.”

The design options have grown in the last decade or so, he said, as pavers — made from precast concrete, clay and natural stone like granite — are being turned out in a range of colors and sizes. Some have rounded edges for an older look; others are mottled to add color variation to the driveway.

Installing a customized driveway is a way to put your own stamp on the hardscape and set your house apart from the rest. Depending on the neighborhood, the materials and the quality of the craftsmanship, Keenan said, a driveway also could increase a home’s resale value.

“It does become a point of distinction,” he said. “It is something people notice. It is elegant.”

The least expensive paved driveways are made of asphalt, which cost about $12 to $15 a square foot, and concrete, costing about $14 to $18 a square foot, Keenan said. Though concrete is more resilient and lasts longer, both materials will crack over time, he said.

Pavers, which start at about $20 to $25 a square foot, should last a lifetime, Keenan said. “The key is the fact that the pavement acts as flexible fabric and it can move with the earth, and isn’t a rigid system and isn’t prone to cracking,” he said.

Pavers can be used to make traditional patterns like basket-weave or herringbone, or be fashioned into a custom look.

For a less traditional look, use a paver that comes in three or four sizes and lay them out at random, Keenan said. Or get a custom design without breaking the bank by using concrete pavers accented with more expensive natural stone pavers.

Keenan is also the co-founder and design director of reGEN Land Design in Minneapolis. He works with homeowners to find the best driveway for their home. People are most concerned with the color, which might be chosen by looking at the home’s roof, siding or trim color.

“I don’t think you can make a value judgment on which one is the best,” Keenan said of driveway designs. “It’s got to fit the building that you’re paving next to.”

He might recommend, for example, a traditional red-brick driveway to go with a light blue Colonial home. For a contemporary, environmentally “green” home, he might choose light-colored, permeable pavers — a more environmentally sound choice because they let water back through to the earth under the driveway, rather than forcing it to run off and collect debris on the way to bodies of water.

In Naples, Fla., landscape architect W. Christian Busk installs “living driveways” that feature real grass interspersed among pavers. That reduces heat and glare and provides some drainage.

“We blur the lines between where driveway ends and where landscape begins,” says Busk, president of Busk Associates. “It always looks beautiful.”

Back in Pasadena, the concrete-and-brick option that Ulick chose is popular among the many Craftsman and other historical homes in the area, said Mark Peters, the chief estimator for Boston Brick Stone, which helped create Ulick’s driveway.

“It’s a very rich feel and it’s understated,” Peters said.

Since he got his driveway in 2009, Ulick said, he has received many compliments, and people sometimes stop to ask if his driveway is the original.

“That’s a bigger compliment,” he said, “that it looks like it’s been done years and years and years ago.”

Jay Sifford, Houzz Contributor and Garden Designer

Many of our gardens seem to be compartmentalized, mimicking our lives. We wake up, go to work, go to lunch, drive home from work, pick up the kids, prepare dinner, watch TV and head to bed, only to repeat the process the next day. The garden spaces with which we surround ourselves are much the same. We have our front yards, our side yards, our backyards, our children’s play areas and our vegetable beds. We have unconsciously convinced ourselves that this is the way it has to be. What if our garden spaces flowed together seamlessly, creating one homogenous space? Are you saying to yourself that this could never happen? Let’s see how it’s done. Let’s learn the art of mastering garden transitions.

1. Reimagine your hardscape and bed lines. Serpentine lines both invoke the imagination and have a relaxing effect upon the mind. In art theory this shape is referred to as the line of beauty. It infuses a composition with vitality, as opposed to straight lines, which signify death or inanimate objects.

This bluestone walkway seems to be endless, disappearing around the bend. Don’t you wonder what lies beyond?

Discover landscaping ideas and find a top local landscape contractor to plan your garden landscape

Perhaps your hardscape is firmly established and not easily changed. No worries. Redesigning your bed lines to create more graceful curves will give your space that flow and intrigue you’ve been missing, allowing for a pleasing transition from space to space.

2. Repeat key elements. The use of a key element repeated throughout a garden gives it peaceful continuity. This technique is especially effective when the key element crosses over a pathway into the parallel bed, moving the eye back and forth throughout the space.

Notice how this shady mixed border carries the eye through the space. Even though this garden relies heavily upon hostas for interest, it is the large-leafed hostas (Hosta cvs,USDA zones 3 to 8) that punctuate the space from side to side and move the eye down the pathway.

The repetition of the large-leafed hostas allows for the peaceful transition to pockets of different plants.

3. Interject an element to induce transition. Boulders can be used to provide interest and contrast. This gives the designer a natural opportunity to begin something new. In this photograph a boulder has been cut into the metal edging along the pathway to provide unexpected interest and a natural transition point between a moss garden and a mass planting of autumn ferns (Dryopteris erythrosora, zones 5 to 9).

4. Become reacquainted with color flow. Think back to middle school science class. Do you remember learning about Roy G. Biv? This initialism was an easy way to remember natural color flow, the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. This same color flow can create a natural and peaceful transition in the garden.

Notice the vibrant yet tranquil progression of color in this well-designed prairie-style garden. Red flows effortlessly into orange, which in turn flows into yellow. Wouldn’t the introduction of a pink or violet flower be an unwelcome intrusion?

Become reacquainted with Roy G. Biv. Your garden will be a better place because of it.

5. Mix up your materials. Perhaps you have an existing patio, or are considering adding one but are unsure how to make it feel like a natural part of your garden.Take a cue from this backyard. The gravel covering the path leading to the patio is the same color as the bluestone patio. Bands of bluestone have been placed within the pathway, creating continuity and a peaceful transition.

In addition, by laying out the pathway in a yatsuhasi, or Japanese zigzag, pattern, the designer has created a unique and dramatic space.

6. Create different levels. Terracing a space can result in both logical and dramatic transitions. The added third dimension allows for more diversity in themes and activities within a confined space.You will notice a surprising number of substrates in this yard, from the gray concrete pads to the tan gravel to the turf. What keeps all of this from being overpowering? The answer lies in the varying heights, masterfully woven together with bands of Cor-Ten steel that mimic the color of the house siding.

7. Add a gate. Bold transitions are desirable to make dramatic statements in some cases. Gates can be aesthetically useful when a garden is too predictable and needs to be injected with interest, or when two distinctly different garden spaces adjoin.

In either case why settle for an ordinary, mundane gate when, with just a bit more effort, you could add something unexpected and unique? Scouring antique shops, import stores and architectural salvage warehouses can yield a treasure trove of possibilities.

Next Next: Browse more inspiring landscapes on Houzz