Design of garage and entrance area

Dear forum members,

we want to redesign the entrance area of our house: new garage door, new front door, new paving and stairs. Unfortunately, the garage door is visually very unfavorably placed (far right) and despite many considerations on how we could design the area so that it looks modern and also has that certain something (wow effect), I have not yet come to a satisfactory result.

Current status: garage door - sectional door dark gray, new front door also dark gray.
Fill in the light shaft on the left and extend the paving up to this boundary forward (gray)
Possibly also wooden cladding in the area next to the garage door.
Entrance stairs either dark natural stone or in the same look as the paving

But as I said, I’m missing the wow effect here. Does anyone have ideas for us? Many thanks in advance.

Are you still driving the car into the garage?

We very rarely, if ever, drive the car into the garage because the door is also quite small (2.30m).

Despite your change, the entrance will look a bit boring. Gray on white, basically. I would put up one or two XXL plant pots with tall plants to bring some color/life in. You can then adjust them to fit your style. Colorfully planted or an olive tree. If the car does end up in the garage, hand trucks and to the side. I would nicely hide the trash bins. Maybe you also have space on the right and can plant two or three Japanese maples there, a kind of mini-avenue. FCN has model gardens; maybe there is one near you. They also send posters with paving stones to lay out so you can see how they look.

I would paint the walls, the plaster in the anthracite color of the roof or even work with wooden cladding and align the garage door and front door color with the cladding of the upper floor. And extend the roof slightly as a pergola so that you don't immediately fall into such a gorge.
Add a nice wall lamp and/or pendant lamp. The corner has great potential, but I wouldn't just take gray gray gray. Otherwise, it will be yawn instead of wow!

Why should the light well actually be closed? Is that good for the basement? I might take up Haydee's idea, to design the grating so that 2 or 3 plant pots can also stand there and then at least one more along the wall in front of it.. that way the light well is better concealed.

And generally, it's good that your garage door is not centered, otherwise there would be conflicts with the platform and the driveway.

What is supposed to happen with the wood cladding?

And wouldn't a colored door and gate perhaps be a better eye-catcher?