For tropical plants try crab claw or gingers for the height to screen the fence and little flashes of brilliant colour. They tend to grow upright rather than outwards. They can be easily cut back without looking scrappy. I'm also thinking of perhaps mother in laws tongues and/or moses cradle. These two are very hardy and pretty cheap plants that can take the odd running over with the car... one thing I've noticed about driveway plants is occasionally someone runs them over! You could space the larger gingers a few metres apart and then fill in the rest of the spaces with the smaller plants. They also reproduce and you can fill in any gaps from accidents with babies from other plants. They also can all handle the hot hot sun and don't bush out. The gingers can come in variegated foliage and I think would have a better coverage and shape than cordylines.

I like the bricks in the fence and you don't want to paint or render this, as you would be providing a lovely, fresh canvas for graffiti 'artists' to scribble on your walls. However, you could create a border area just in front of the fence and plant some shrubs or narrow trees. (Just saw a segment on Catalyst on the ABC the other day on types of trees which help to filter out pollution from your home. Silver birch trees seemed to do well, whilst taking up very little space and being quite sparse.) Even a border of mondo grass would be good, though this is very short in height.

Probably not a bad choice actually. We'll be seeing a lot more of these permeable driveways in the not to distant future as they reduce rainwater run off from our sites into our gutters. Use a combination of both concrete and permeable perhaps. Such as where you park the bike on its stand or do bike maintenance use concrete. There are other permeable pavers available as well as these ones, council's use them a lot around parklands, trees in footpaths.

there are way too many colours going on here. Your home is a traditional style and yes the cream and green are traditional colours with the reddish brick however why did you put grey around the windows??also you have red scollops above the grey and it doesn't do the house justice. What colour was there before you painted the grey?? considering grey is a more modern colour I think you were attempting to modernise the externals. in saying that the roof would have been better to paint charcoal the cream in white and then the grey and then the driveway would be done in a grey stain. but if you leave it the way it is and cover the red scolloping above the windows the same grey and the bricks below the windows near the ground grey as well then get the drive way restained to the reddish colour of the bricks on the house and then it would blend more and look inviting.