Your landscape design deserves to be admired not only during the day but at night too. For homeowners in York, PA, you can expand their outdoor living by adding accent lighting to their landscape. It’ll provide them with evening access to the great outdoors, spotlight the best features of their landscape design, and give them a way to control the mood when they’re just relaxing or throwing a party.
Wall Lighting
Exterior wall lighting has several different options that achieve the same goal. These lights highlight an exterior wall, casting warm shadows across the client’s outdoor living area. The main decision before you concerns where your client wants the light to be most prominent. You can help the homeowners choose a wall-mounted light such as a sconce or a lantern, depending on the aesthetic of their overall landscape.
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The advantage to wall lighting is that it produces indirect light, offering much better visibility than a direct light source. If your client desires an even more indirect light experience, then wall-wash fixtures are an excellent way to produce a different mood. These are installed in a bed in front of the house, shining light onto the wall.
Path Lighting
Path lighting, as the name implies, illuminates the paths around the client’s house. It’s a must for making a backyard space accessible at night, but it also can add to the overall beauty of the yard in the evening. Whether it’s lighting up the sidewalk to the front door or defining a path through flower beds, lighting can bring a new design aspect to a landscape. Path lights can be small posts that are capped with a light fixture and diffuser.
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A wired path lighting system uses direct burial wire along the paths to power the lights. The advantage to this is the ability to change the variables of the lighting such as dimming or turning them on or off at a centrally wired location. With LED technology, very little power is used to produce effects ranging from subtle to stunning.
Many people are interested in solar lighting for the ease of installation. Unfortunately, as of this writing there are NO professional grade solar lights on the market.
Feature Lighting
The category of featured lighting consists of various different fixtures that will illuminate the features of your client’s outdoor living area. It uses angles and shadows to produce the perfect ratio of light and darkness.
One example is well lights. These lights are recessed into the ground to create a seamless lighting fixture for both hardscape and softscape settings. This type of lighting is most commonly used to uplight trees. Casting light across the branches can illuminate a gorgeous tree that’s worth admiring.
Another common type of feature lighting is utilizing spotlights throughout the outdoor living area. Much like wall lighting, spotlights are used to highlight specific features such as an outdoor fireplace or a water feature. When it comes to spotlights, there is a fine line between just enough and too much. Overlighting an area can cause it to become overwhelmingly bright. When choosing where to put spotlights, try highlighting one aspect at a time with each light. They are meant for key elements such as statues, water features, and outdoor kitchens.
Image courtesy of Unilock.
