Highlight These 4 Materials From Our Landscape Supply With Strategic Outdoor Lighting in Lancaster, PA
If your clients are looking for show-stopping drama in their landscape renovations, you’ll want to consider the visual impact not only for daytime but after dark, too. What is illuminated can be just as important as how it is illuminated. You can highlight these four materials from our landscape supply with strategic outdoor lighting in Lancaster, PA.
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Think Beyond the Softscape
Plants and trees are fairly obvious objects to spotlight or artistically illuminate with landscape lighting. However, showcasing masonry features in creative ways can also bring some serious wow factor to a landscape.
1. Retaining Walls
Low-voltage landscape lighting set into a retaining wall could be a beautiful way to illuminate the space directly under and around the wall, and also bring attention to its textures. The best candidates for illuminating masonry features like retaining walls include textured natural stone and manufactured stone veneer.
Even a smooth poured concrete or stucco wall can be illuminated with a wash lighting technique. This light will reflect off the surface and create soft, indirect lighting for walkways, driveways, patios, or pool decks beside the illuminated wall.
With walls, there are several placement options that you can implement. One is to install lights directly under the cap stone and aim them downward; the other is to install lights at the base of the wall and orient them upward onto the wall. Both techniques will highlight the textures and create a pleasing light that won’t blind anyone.
2. Outdoor Kitchen Walls
Whether your clients have a built-in grill station or a full outdoor kitchen, this is a great opportunity to install landscape lighting for yet more unobtrusive fixtures that offer just the right amount of light for the surrounding dining and seating areas. This solution highlights the wall textures and surrounding patio paver textures.
As with retaining walls, fixtures could be installed just below the counter and shine down onto the patio surface, while grazing the wall along the way to reveal its textures. This is an especially dramatic effect if the walls are made of thin, stacked flagstone (or a veneer) or brick.
In outdoor kitchens, light fixtures could also be installed on the backsplash to brighten up the work surface—another unobtrusive and elegant outdoor lighting solution that will highlight a backsplash made of texture-rich natural stone or manufactured stone veneers.
3. Pavers
Positioning landscape lighting low to the ground, and angled across a walkway, patio, or driveway, will provide secure passage with no harsh shadows, but at the same time will make the most of any textures present on the surface. This effect is especially dramatic when illuminating the look of cobblestone, brick, or rustic-textured flagstone.
Some modern hardscapes might feature predominantly smooth textures but also pavers with brushed finishes—these are another great opportunity to create visual interest with landscape lighting.
Ground-level recessed light fixtures are an interesting way to add drama to walkways and driveways, giving the space a runway-like appearance after dark.
4. Water Features
You can really go to town lighting up water features, whether they’re stand-alone water fountains, waterfalls, or pillar-mounted bubbler fountains. For the most dramatic effect, use both submersible lighting along with fixtures mounted in the hardscape feature or embedded in the ground.
Image Source: Unilock