Maximum Effect with Outdoor Lighting
Artfully crafted outdoor lighting can beautify and extend the usability of your outdoor landscape.
Outdoor Lighting for Illumination and Effect
Enjoy your backyard space during the evening and nighttime hours by employing some of these outdoor lighting techniques and imagine how you could benefit.
Outdoor lighting is so often neglected.
As a deck and landscape designer the one area that I feel has been unfortunately neglected is the use of outdoor lighting. Too often, the instinct is to create too much illumination.
When it comes to lighting on a deck, on stairs, or in a landscape, the objective should be quiet, soft, indirect lighting.
We achieve this in a number of ways. One, we use more LED lighting as opposed to incandescent lighting, which tends to be a softer white. The advantage of LED lighting is that it lasts much longer. Used in deck lighting, we tuck it in between beams and hide it behind the bull nose of the stairs. This allows us to actually provide the illumination without necessarily seeing the lighting.
In areas that we require more lighting, such as the bar area or over top of the cook top, we’ll incorporate some track lighting, which definitely provides more illumination. These will often be switched separately so that if we want to create that quiet ambiance we can turn off the track lighting and have only the LED lighting on.
Consistent with the softness of LED lighting, the warm glow of a candle or a flame in an outdoor fireplace completes the effect. Similarly, when choosing lighting fixtures, wall sconces on the house should really match fixtures in the landscape. Again, the objective with stair lighting is to keep the light as inconspicuous as possible. To that end, we’ll tuck in behind the bull nose of the stairs. The advantage of this is that the tread is illuminated in the evening and clearly visible but the fixture itself is not.
