Landscape Lighting to Enjoy Your Outdoor Living All Season Long

We all know this feeling –  darkness (especially during our long winters) can be hard to come home to, so this is the time of year when we find that landscape lighting really shines. By lending cozy elegance to the night landscape and safely illuminating paths and steps, lighting allows us to enjoy our outdoor living spaces all season long. Here are some features and benefits of utilizing lighting for your outdoor living spaces.

Ambiance

Landscape lighting can create an ambient evening experience, illuminating a dining area, gracing a wall with mood-defining sconces, or twinkling overhead from a pergola’s beams. Beautiful in their simplicity, café lights and pendant lamps offer atmospheric illumination, more for the ambiance than for powerful light.  

When it comes to the patio, there are infinite choices for these focal light fixtures.  Based on the style of a space and its use, designers choose lighting with the same detailed care that we put into every other aspect of the landscape.  If you are making choices for your own landscape, we recommend picking a fixture theme and sticking with it.  Matching is never a bad thing when it comes to good design.

Downward-facing wall sconces illuminate stairs and gardens in this complex terraced design.  We also incorporated strung café lights on this project – cute!

Path Lighting

In lighting pathways and steps, there are many choices! For a more modern look, inset lighting or riser lights on steps and walls are minimalist and effective. We use them on projects of all styles for their great effect. For ornamental lighting, especially on a path the winds though a garden, downward-facing path lights are classic. For ultimate convenience and lasting durability, lighting can be controlled by digital transformers and a managed through a phone app. LED landscape lighting lasts for a long time on minimal energy.

This landscape is enhanced with riser lights on the bluestone steps.  Wall fixtures with a classical look match the black detailing.

Uplighting for Definition

Finally, in lighting gardens, fountains, and other features, we use a variety of techniques to highlight focal points and create definition. Up-lights on trees, shrubs, walls and sculptures have powerful impact, and well lights at the edge of a border can create an ambient effect.  

The one key to landscape lighting is keeping the light where you want it! Choosing lower lumen wattage lighting and angling fixtures away from the eyes of guests (and neighbors) will create beautiful, non-blinding lighting. With that in mind, bring light into your outdoor space and love your landscape all night long!