Your home may be stunning during the day, but it needs to sparkle just as much at night! Outdoor lighting installation is essential to ensure that your home’s unique features are enjoyable in the evening. Outdoor lighting is necessary to appreciate evening weather, helping extend your garden gatherings well past the setting sun. Keep reading for our top landscape lighting ideas and critically answered questions.
Top 4 Landscape Lighting Ideas
Outdoor lighting can dramatically change the look of any home at night. Without lighting, a home’s features and landscaping are almost invisible. Exterior lighting elegantly displays landscaping and architecture and adds to curb appeal. It also provides a welcoming atmosphere for guests to arrive at night.
Landscape Lighting for Navigation Safety
If you spend time in your yard at night, lighting is essential to your safety. Navigating pathways, stairs, steps, ledges, and pool areas can be treacherous in the dark for your family and guests. Adequate lighting decreases the chances of falls and injuries. Post-mounted lanterns are great for driveways and stairs, and wall lights are excellent choices for doorways and entrances. Step and path lights can help you find your way through your garden or around pools in the dark.
Landscaping Lighting for Home Security
Lighting your home is one of the top things you can do to increase security and ward off potential intruders. Lighting does not have to be intrusive or harsh to be an effective security measure. Timed lighting can help protect your home even when you are not there. Additionally, motion-sensitive spotlights are useful around doorways and other entrances without ruining your aesthetic. We suggest putting these lights by entry points, such as the front and back doors, as well as around garages, decks, and patios. If you have exterior buildings, such as a detached garage, shed, or workshop, we advise placing lights on those buildings as well.
Landscape Lighting for Enhanced Home Value and Functionality
Outdoor lighting can add value to your home by highlighting design elements and features around your home, even making it appear larger. Adding professional outdoor lighting can also increase the usability of your outdoor spaces, another big home selling point. Enjoying passing time outdoors in your garden, patio, pool area, or deck can be carried into the evening with the proper lighting, perfect for those friends who come over for dinner but stay way past the final nightcap! We suggest placing outdoor lighting in any location where you and your guests frequent when outside.
Landscape Lighting for Highlighted Aesthetic
Your home and landscaping features are beautiful, so why let them get swallowed up in the night? You may have a gorgeously trimmed tree, a stunning piece of art, or a hardscape piece that deserves to be lighted all day and night. There are a variety of outdoor lighting techniques you can use to highlight your space. Our favorites include:
- Wall washing
- In-ground lighting
- Moonlighting
- Silhouetting
- Shadowing
- Path Lighting
Learn more about each of these landscape lighting ideas by clicking HERE!
Should Landscape Lights Stay On All Night?
Landscape lighting should be programmed on a timer to turn on at dusk, but not all of your landscape lighting needs to stay on all night. For your aesthetic, you can have these turn off at roughly the time you go to sleep since you will no longer need them, and it will help to save on electricity costs.
For your navigation lighting, you can have these turn off, again, when you go to sleep or be motion-activated should you need to move around your yard in the middle of the night. Using solar-powered lighting is also a common option for pathway lighting so to minimize electrical usage but keep the lights on well into the night.
Your security lighting should stay on all night, turning off at dawn. Should something happen in the night, you will want to be able to quickly see outside without running for a light switch.
What Color of Light is Best for Landscaping?
The color of light you choose for your landscaping can affect the mood and emotional impact of the design. Landing squarely in the middle of the color temperature scale is warm white (2700K) and natural white (3000K) lighting, the preferred option for landscape lighting as it gives off a welcoming and soothing atmosphere.
These, however, are not the only options. Different areas of your landscape design can utilize different color lighting. For example, a very warm light (2200K) provides a relaxing, romantic atmosphere, great for hot tubs or outdoor fireplaces. On the opposite end of the spectrum, cool white light (4000K) illuminates blue vegetation and simulates moonlight, a great choice to highlight a blue spruce tree or create an almost fairy-tale-like appearance.
How Far Apart Should Landscape Light Be?
While this varies from person to person, the industry standard for landscaping lighting spacing is 6 to 8 feet apart. This distance allows for enough light to traverse a path safely without the lights radium overtly overlapping and creating a runway feel. We recommend this distance of lighting for the majority of your lighting, especially immediately around your home. If you have a large outdoor space, you can further separate the lights in the distance if you have no reason to see all the way to your fence line.
Does Landscape Lighting Use a Lot of Electricity?
Depending on the size of your landscape lighting design and the type of lightbulbs you use (LEDs are the most cost-efficient), your landscape lighting could add anywhere from $5 (for a moderately sized landscape design) to $25 (for a huge landscape lighting design) to your electricity bill. Most homeowners find anywhere on this scale to be a small price to pay for the safety, beauty, and functionality their outdoor lighting provides them.
Design Scapes – LA Outdoor Lighting Experts
Do you want professional outdoor lighting installation for your property? We at Design Scapes are highly experienced, trained lighting specialists who can help you highlight your home and add that much-needed functionality. For more information, book a consultation with us today.
