There are so many lovely plants to choose from you would have to narrow it down a lot before we can offer any real help. Can you post a photo or two? Which part of the country are yo in? Are you very near to the sea? Which colours do you like? Do you want a variety to last for a long flowering season? How big is each flower bed? Do you want them all the same height? Do you want scent or colour? (you can have both if you wish).

my living

Hi, are you in the UK? Just that I’ve never seen sand used in that way. With the path you could add small pea shingle around the paving slabs to tidy it up a bit. If that is your front garden on the left, then as Ellie suggests, planting will help. However, sand is not nutritious enough to grow plants in, unless you have the climate to grow cacti and succulents. What to grow depends on your location and whether the area is sunny or shady. A pot either side of the front door would look smart.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. Definitely want to keep the two doors- we have a beautifully tiled floor and are in the process of renovating the hallway, so that it is the main guest entrance through the original door. The new door leads into a bootroom for coats, muddy dogs and boots, with the far end as a laundry area and is therefore definitely not an entrance I would want visitors using. If we remove the old porch we will then have to repair the render on the front of the house, which we would prefer not to do. I am very open to using and paying for design services- we have used an interior designer for the inside of the house, but she is currently away on holiday and booked out for a while and we have quite a tight and unexpected deadline with the builder if we want this done this year and before winter. This is the bootroom entrance (bench not yet painted and room clearly not yet finished from a styling perspective ) so you can see that it is not a suitable main entrance. Main hallway is plastered but waiting to be painted / decorated along with stairs and landing.