When my daughter moved into the house next door, the huge corner lot was all lawn and a couple of trees plus a shrub or two. We covered the whole area with overlapping cardboard and a layer of mulch provided for free by a local tree company.
The idea was simple: plant into the mulch small starts of a handful of different native shrubs. We added a drip system and left a plain dirt pathway out to the street. Eventually my daughter filled in underneath the shrubs with some spring bulbs and few groundcovers. 
The result after 15 years is an extremely low maintenance and varied landscape behind which the house is all but hidden from the road.
There are many approaches to xeriscaping, this one being perhaps the simplest and most cost effective method for dealing with a large area.