Driveways Become the New Status Symbol

By Eileen Daspin
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
From The Wall Street Journal Online

While landscaping the front lawn of her Danville, Calif., ranch house last year, Shawn Kelmon Young fell in love. With her $14,000, faux-slate driveway.

"It's my pride and joy. It's my baby," says Mrs. Young, an accountant who admits to whiling away her afternoons admiring the 960-square-foot expanse of concrete stamped to look like slate. "If someone comes over with an older car, I make them park in the street. I don't want any drips on it."

For the homeowner who can't afford the 40,000-square-foot megamansion, a designer driveway is the next best thing to Hearst Castle. It adds value to the house and wins respect from the neighbors. And though driveways may lack the sex appeal of the cars that run over them, the style of the lawns they cut across and the prestige of the homes they serve, there's no doubt about it: Driveways are coming into their own.

"People are tired of seeing concrete," says Orlando, Fla., contractor Michael Kamenoff. What's hot now "is the retro look," he says, referring to "the strips of concrete with the grass in between." In fact, treating the driveway as a landscape element is a growing national trend. Car sizes are ballooning; the number of cars per home is rising. Driveways aren't only getting wider, they're forcing themselves into the plans of designers and sparking the unlikeliest of housing developments: the driveway moment.

The main catalyst behind the changes in driveways is the boom in sport-utility vehicles, says Charles Taylor, a Saugerties, N.Y., designer who is working on two driveway projects in upstate New York. While 20 years ago a typical driveway would have maxed out at about 10 feet in width, driveways being built today generally run 12-to-14 feet and wider. The breadth issue alone has forced "driveways to become a more important element in the design of the house," Mr. Taylor says. "People don't want their driveways looking like airport runways" or their "garages looking like warehouses."

Instead of caulking between paving stones, some landscape architects plant grass to sprout up between the stones. Michael Valente, a New York-based designer, is working on a driveway in California that has a sycamore tree in the middle of it. For a 28-foot-wide driveway in upstate New York, Mr. Taylor is using 14-inch-square bluestone tiles interspersed with ivy.

While many trendy driveways cost more than asphalt or concrete, which typically runs $2 to $5 a square foot, they are much less expensive than cobblestone or gravel lined with Belgian brick. In warmer climates, where concrete is the most economical surface, many homeowners opt for impressioned-concrete drives. This is a process popularized by Bomanite Corp., of Madera, Calif., at such theme parks as Busch Gardens in Tampa, Fla. Poured colored concrete is stamped with a grate to make the surface look like cobblestone or brick. "It costs four or five times more than a regular driveway," says Orlando contractor Mr. Kamenoff, but at $8 to $10 a square foot, installation included, it's thousands of dollars less than actual bricks.

When Cedar Grove, N.J., homeowner Michael Crielly replaced his temporary asphalt driveway with a permanent one, he went with composite-stone "pavers" made by Cambridge Pavers Inc., Lyndhurst, N.J., that are cast to look like brick. "We think it's a richer look at the end of the day," says Mr. Crielly. Though he estimates the surface cost nearly twice as much as asphalt, Mr. Crielly says the $6.50-per-square-foot price tag was worth it. Besides, "I don't plan on moving for 20 years and I have to look at it," he says. "In the long run it will add more value to the house."

Real-estate agents agree with Mr. Crielly. Driveways add value to a home and influence a buyer's first impressions. "If your shoes are tattered, your underwear is torn," says Albuquerque, N.M., real-estate agent Susan Feil of Parnegg Metro Coldwell Banker. "A driveway is a very subtle indicator to the buyer of a home of how the property is maintained." Ms. Feil recently insisted that a potential client repair the driveway before taking the listing. "It was cracked and gave the impression that there was a structural problem with the land," she says.

Connecticut real-estate broker Carolyn Klemm says the cost of a driveway upgrade can be doubly recouped upon home resale. "It's like adding a screened porch or a pool," she says. "If it costs you 10 [thousand], it will be worth 20 [thousand] to the next owner, because the appeal is greater and they don't have to go through the aggravation of putting it in."