5 Tips For Effective Landscape Lighting

Landscape Lighting For Beauty

Landscape lighting is about more than just seeing your home, it’s about seeing the beauty of your home. It’s easy to place some lights along a walkway so you know where you’re going at night. If that’s all you want, you don’t need much help from us, but why not make the most of it? Good landscape lighting can really make your home stand out. Want to know how? Here’s some tips.

Tip 1: Start Around Your House

While your yard can be quite a sight to behold, the yard isn’t the point of your house, your house is the point of the yard. The yard is supposed to enhance the appearance of your home, so when it comes to landscape lighting, you want to start around your home.

Start by lighting up your house. There needs to be enough light to see as you walk around it, but it should also highlight the best looking features of your home. In the dark, any light will grab the eye, so adding a bit of extra light to your home’s best features will show off why your home is worth looking at in the first place.

Tip 2: Don’t Overdo It

When it comes to landscape lighting, the goal is to draw attention to your best features. The temptation is to add more lights to the areas you want people to look at. While a bit of extra light in the right place will do that, if you go overboard, you end up drawing attention to the lights instead of the features you’re lighting. Quite often, one or two lights in the right place will do far more to highlight your home than a dozen lights trying to show off every thing.

And don’t forget, shadows are needed for the eye to recognize texture. If you over-light an object, you get rid of most of the shadows, which makes it look flatter and less real. The trick is to find the right balance of light and shadow to make it stand out.

Tip 3: Stagger The Lights

If you place all of the lights on your path in a straight line with a clear pattern, it becomes boring to look at. Patterns in nature are rarely simple and so simple patterns look very artificial. Your pathways look like airport runways instead invitations to explore.

To avoid this, space your lights out a bit less evenly. Stagger them out, alternating between one side of the path and the other. You can also place the lights so they shine down the pathway, better allowing you to mix up the patterns while still adequately placing the lights.

Be careful not to go overboard, though. The human brain is hardwired to look for patterns. It isn’t satisfied until it finds one, but if the pattern is too easy to sort out, it stops devoting attention to it. Simple patterns are boring, but no pattern at all is uncomfortable.

Tip 4: Use the Right Bulbs

Landscape lighting is a careful balance of light output vs. energy consumption. You need to have enough light to see, but you don’t want it to use so much energy that your bill shoots through the roof. It’s easy to go overboard here, too. If you use bulbs that put out too much light, not only do they cost you more power, but they also create harsh glares that are ugly to look at.

This is why we use LED lights for a lot of landscape lighting. LED lights give a lot of light, but use very little power. It’s by far the most cost-effective measure and now it comes with a variety of options to give you a nice, warm glow. The best use of LEDs is a downward focused lighting to avoid glare and use reflected light to give you a soft glow.

Tip 5: Don’t Let Out of Sight Be Out of Mind

While you shouldn’t try to light up every square inch of your yard, don’t overlook the small out of the way areas. Even the places you don’t normally look at can have natural beauty that enhances your yard.

Not to mention security. Burglars are going to be looking for places they can slip into your yard unseen. Lighting up the out of the way corners of your yard is a good way to keep them away. If they can’t slip in unnoticed, they’re most likely going to look for another place to rob.

We’re Landscape Lighting Experts

There’s a lot of things to consider for landscape lighting, far more than we could cover in just one article. That makes it hard to make the most of it. Fortunately, here at Portland Sprinklers and Landscape Lighting, we’re experts. We can help you find the right balance to make your home and yard a sight to behold. Your neighbors will marvel as they walk by your home at night! If you’re looking to make your home really stand out, get in touch with us today!  We’ll help you make your home a thing of beauty!