With the summer entertaining season just around the corner, now is the perfect time to devote to designing an outdoor lighting scheme that will allow you to enjoy your landscape at night, especially if you’re planning to host a big barbecue. Landscape lighting requires proper planning—you wouldn’t want to light up the whole neighborhood or attract every bug to your party.
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Outdoor Lighting Considerations
First, assess your needs. There are three main types of outdoor lighting to consider.
The first is safety: security lighting deters prowlers, and path lighting makes it safe to walk around your property without tripping.
The second type of lighting is task lighting. You’ll need this in your outdoor kitchen or grill area.
The third type is accent lighting. This highlights special features in the landscape such as a gnarled old tree or the texture of a masonry retaining wall. It is also used to create ambience and give each outdoor “room” (or area) its own unique atmosphere.
Security and Safety
Security lighting is typically the brightest type of lighting in the landscape. It illuminates larger areas and it is usually mounted higher, such as the eaves (where it blends into the home’s trim) or over a garage. This type of lighting is not usually on during a party because it is so bright and tends to cast strong shadows, but it’s useful when guests are arriving and departing. Security floodlights can be motion-detected or manual. Walkway lighting is a type of safety lighting that provides attractive illumination for walkways or even the perimeter of a patio without blinding people. Walkway lighting is installed low to the ground, either as stand-alone fixtures or embedded in retaining walls, seating walls, steps, or even along the home’s foundation. It’s a popular way to emphasize flower beds, or it can be installed to provide just enough ambient light around a fire pit to maneuver safely once the fire is out. Path lighting tends to be lower voltage than security lighting and casts a much smaller lighted area. Path lights can be hard-wired or individual solar-powered units.
Task Lighting
Task lighting for outdoor cooking areas needs to be mounted high enough to adequately illuminate work spaces, but not be so bright that it is blinding and casts strong shadows. This type of landscape lighting can be mounted to the home to illuminate an adjacent grill station. Or you could look into wall-mounted sconces for a pergola, to illuminate your full outdoor kitchen. Dimmer lights positioned at the countertops also help illuminate the work space.
Accent Lighting
Set the mood with dramatic or subtle accent lighting. String lights are a fun way to add a warm ambience to outdoor dining and lounging areas. Path lighting can be installed in masonry for an unobtrusive and attractive way to illuminate a space without visual clutter. Spotlights (uplights) and other specialty lighting creates dramatic focal points throughout the landscape.
Once you have determined what types of lighting you need for each outdoor room, you can turn your attention to creating lighting zones. This allows you to turn on individual rooms—just as you would turn on the lights in one bedroom at a time rather than lighting up the entire house with one switch. Your choices here can create a more pleasing atmosphere for small or large parties than the old-school way of mounting a high-voltage flood light to the house and lighting up the whole neighborhood.
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