An exterior lighting design helps complete your landscaping project. After investing time, money and creativity in your home’s exterior detailing and landscaping, don’t forget to turn on the lights with a well thought out outdoor lighting design..
A well-designed exterior “lightscape” enhances a home’s best assets, adds drama, and keeps your home safe and secure. Every shimmering result depends on a carefully constructed plan. Here are five effective landscape lighting techniques to create your best lightscape ever!
Up-Lighting
Up-lighting is a term used to describe objects that are lit from below. When installing, it’s important to make sure the lights don’t point toward observers and cause a glare.
Moonlighting
Moonlighting is the opposite of up-lighting. Lights placed in trees can cast a dramatic and attractive glow to the ground below and mimic the moon glow. They also provide security to otherwise darkened areas.
Pathlighting
Low placed path lights are the best for walkway and steps. The globe shield the light from above and focuses it on the pathway. Pathlights are available in many low-voltage styles, as well as solar powered.
Shadowing
Remember the shadow puppets you enjoyed as a kid? You can use the same technique to light smaller shrubs and cast a big glow on your home. The shadow effect will move as the wind breezes over your landscape, making this technique even more interesting. This also works great for an architectural feature, like an arbor.
Grazing
Grazing is a dramatic technique that can be used to cast a glow across the surface of the building or wall surface. Its a great way to highlight your homes architectural features.
6 tips to plan the perfect landscape lighting layout
Budget for impact
Exterior lighting costs can range from minimal to maximal depending on the investment you want to make. Illuminating a home where you plan to be for only a few years will merit a different level of investment than a longer-term abode where you’ll be making ongoing outdoor improvements and additions.
In either case, be honest with yourself and your exterior lighting designer about what’s most important to accomplish; from there, system elements and installation plans can be prioritized. You may choose to execute a grand scheme over the course of a few years, or make a smaller, one-time investment.
Style meets function
In the most successful outdoor lighting schemes, function and aesthetics go hand in hand. Consider safety, traffic patterns, and how you’ll use outdoor “rooms.” Intimate spaces for informal gatherings with family and friends will call for different utility and effects than major entertainment centers.
Long-lasting effects
Whether you’re working with a pro or shopping for do-it-yourself outdoor lighting systems, go for quality fixtures and components, because you’ll definitely get what you pay for. Low-voltage is the way to go, but you really need to work with good materials.
Look for durable natural materials like copper and brass, and choose fixtures with glass enclosures. Lifetime warranties are also available on many of the better products. It’s also important to invest in a trustworthy transformer for your system; otherwise, you could wind up with a lighting scheme that fades around the edges, or, worse, a complete blackout.
Creating mood and focus
A range of fixtures make it possible to illuminate your home’s exterior as well as any Hollywood lighting designer could. But focus, focus, focus is the mantra to have in mind before you go lighting crazy—too much is too much.
In the front and back yards, carefully choose focal points to receive the brightest and most dramatic spotlight (whether an unusual tree, water feature, or architectural ornament), and build the rest of the scheme around them. Overall, shoot for a natural look that replicates moonlight streaming softly from above, as opposed to heavy doses of uplighting.
Safety and security
Harking back to the utility portion of outdoor lighting planning, illuminating for safety and security should be central considerations. Make sure to shed light on outdoor pathway lighting, all walkways, stair treads and risers, low-to-the-ground water features, and grade changes. In addition to careful placement, the light’s qualities should expose potential intruder hideaways as well as regularly used thoroughfares.
Advanced lighting control systems also protect your home whether you’re in or away. Timers, light-sensitive photo cells, remote controls, and computerized systems can all help you manage your new lighting scheme. We suggest a combination of controls, with front yards on automatic timer systems and back yards on more flexible, homeowner-managed networks.
Artful installation
And when should you actually start digging in and implementing your outdoor lighting scheme? You can install anytime, but it’s best to get the designer involved as early as possible in the home renovation or building process. It’s not mandatory, but it works your advantage. In the ideal conditions, lighting pros can usually do installation work in two phases: wiring and system controls are installed before paving and plantings arrive, and after they’re in place, the team returns to mount and fine-tune fixtures. Such an approach creates the opportunity to integrate controls with the rest of a home’s systems for convenience and a dazzling result.
Proper landscape lighting provides security and safety to a homeowners property. Having well lit walkways provides risk free tripping along the pathways. Illuminating the entire house provides good security from unwanted visitors.