Landscape Lighting—Enjoying Your Outdoor Spaces After Dark
Landscape lighting can turn any ordinary outdoor space into a magical place, one that you love to spend time in and show off to your friends and family.
Landscape lighting has practical benefits too. It "lights the way" so you and your guests can see, explore, and enjoy your yard at night. It's also a great way to highlight those raised planters you worked on during the spring, or that brand-new patio you installed last summer. With so many different types of outdoor lighting options, it can be hard choosing which landscape lighting to install first!
Benefits of Landscape Lighting
Below, you’ll find some great lighting techniques for maximizing your outdoor space. First, let’s review some of the benefits of landscape lighting.
Illuminates Your Outdoor Living Spaces
With the appropriate outdoor lighting, your patio, deck and backyard are perfect spaces to entertain, share meals, and spend time with your family and friends. By illuminating your outdoor spaces, you're essentially making them usable at night. You can even choose to install lights that come with a dimmer feature allowing you to use brighter light when the kids are outside playing, and low light for romantic evenings with your spouse.
Highlights Your Landscaping
By strategically placing outdoor lighting throughout your yard, you can highlight many of the plants and features you once could only appreciate during daylight hours. Using path and walkway lighting, you can guide people safely to and from your home's entrances. You can also use outdoor lighting to create barriers to areas of the yard you do not wany people to enter. Outdoor lights are also an excellent way to show off special features in your yard like water features, colorful flower beds, and the architecture of special trees.
Enhances Property Value and Curb Appeal
The addition of outdoor lighting to your home will most certainly increase your property value ensuring a great return on your investment while enjoying the many benefits it provides you and your family. By strategically placing outdoor lighting throughout your yard, you can showcase the great natural features, and increase your curb appeal. Outdoor lights can also be used to highlight the special architectural elements of your home.
Keeps Everyone Safe
Not only is outdoor lighting beautiful, it is also an excellent way to make your home a safer place for your family, friends, and any other guests that visit your property. As mentioned, you can use light posts to illuminate paths, walkways, and even your drive. You'll also want to install lights near stairs and steps, or where surfaces are uneven helping to prevent tripping or even falling. By using outdoor lighting, you can keep your family safe while enjoying your yard at night.
Deters Crime
One of the most important features of outdoor lighting is that it adds a layer of security to your home by deterring burglary which some sources claim is the biggest threat to your home. Flood lights do a fantastic job of brightening some of the dark spaces created by the design of your home. Your guests will certainly feel more comfortable visiting your home at night if they can see a clear path to your well-lit porch and front entry.
Types of Landscape Lighting
With so many options, you might need some help figuring out what type of light is right for what you are trying to accomplish. Here are some examples of lightning techniques used by Snow Creek and the lights that go with them:
Path & Spread Lights
These lights are designed to illuminate pathways and stairs so that you can walk safely and comfortably at night. They usually aren’t a huge source of light—just enough to brighten up what otherwise would be a dimly lit path with unknown obstacles, while also adding a warm and inviting atmosphere to your backyard.
Up Lights
Up lights, often used as accent lights, are perfect If you have a feature of your home or yard that you want to highlight such as the walls of your house, rocks, or trees. Just as the name implies, they shine light up to one of your yard’s focal points. Shining light from below adds a dramatic and enchanting effect to whatever it is focused on.
Down Lights
Down lights are lights that are placed above the area you want to highlight. As the name implies, they shine down from above. These lights can be used to brighten an entire area of your yard rather than a specific feature. These lights will improve visibility of your overall space, but can also be used in more specific ways, such as moonlighting. Moonlighting is the term for placing a light in a tree where some of the branches and leaves appear as shadows. This emulates natural moonlight and adds dimension to your yard.
Deck & Patio Lights
Deck & patio lights are like down lights except they are made for these active social areas. In these spaces, the lights themselves stand out more, and you should consider the size, style, and finish as an extension of the color palette and materials of your deck or patio. These lights provide ample lighting in sitting and social areas and should be used liberally in order to light up the faces of your friends and family.
Hardscape Lights
A Hardscape refers to the “hard” features of your backyard such as walls, pavers, stairways, rocks, water features, fire features and more. Hardscape lighting is made to fit into these spaces and add lighting directly on the object. It can be used to light pathways or specific features such as an outdoor kitchen island.
Water Lights
Water Lights are a type of specialty light that are fully sealed so they can be placed in wet areas or even underwater. These lights show off water features and perform much like up lights in that they accent points of focus.
We want to be your landscape lighting expert.
If you are looking to add landscape lighting to your home, Snow Creek Landscaping is the right team of experts to get the project done and done right. For more information on landscape lighting, contact us today by clicking below! We look forward to hearing from you!