The curb appeal of your home is influenced by how visitors perceive and experience your front yard. You may have the most beautiful front yard in the neighborhood, but without proper nighttime lighting, your front yard becomes dark and dangerous. Using a combination of smart and eco-conscious lighting strategies can help your landscape shine at night just as it does during the day. Now you can brighten up your front yard with these four landscape lighting ideas in Yorktown and Peekskill, NY.
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Low-Lying Lights: Smart Walkway Lighting
Beyond just looking great, the primary function of your front yard is providing a safe place to access the front door to your house. At night, this means giving adequate illumination to the surface of your front walkway. While using overhead lighting is a good way to achieve this, placing your walkway lights near the ground will be more practical and energy efficient. This strategy will help focus the energy of the light sources as well as keep the angle low and avoid contact with anyone’s eyes. It will also help avoid creating dangerous shadows that can obscure walking obstacles. Use an array of solar-powered path lights that fit within your plantings or along your front lawn or walkway. You can even place the lights within a masonry structure such as a retaining wall if that’s part of your front yard landscape design.
Backsplashing: Using Your Vertical Surfaces
During your landscape lighting design process, be sure to take into account your vertical surfaces, as they provide excellent visual texture as well as lighting strategy advantages. If you have any blank walls such as the side of your home, you can shine a bullet light directly at the wall or privacy fence, so the light bounces back onto the surrounding surfaces. If you have any gorgeous rock outcroppings, be sure to use these as well since they’ll become a stunning nighttime attraction in your front yard. This technique is known as backsplashing and it does an excellent job of eliminating dark corners of your landscape that otherwise could negatively become a security issue.
A Layered Look
You may have seen driveways and walkways that have a runway effect of low-lying lights along their entire length. While effective at defining these spaces, it’s not the most pleasing way to illuminate a front yard since anything more than a few feet from these lights will be dark. Instead, opt for a layered effect where certain features such as individual trees or shrubs provide points of light within the landscape. There will be enough ambient light from these fixtures to give dimension to the landscape; and the runway effect won’t be as pronounced.
Spotlighting: Taking Advantage of Water Features
Much like the other features of your landscape, you can take advantage of a water feature such as a fountain in your front yard to provide a warm welcome to your friends. Water naturally has excellent refractive properties that allow light to shine brightly and even scatter with any movement of the water. Install submersible lights within any water feature or reflecting pool to automatically let it glow with blue light and spread accents of dancing ripples. Set some lights behind a waterfall to let it be one of the features that commands attention in your front yard.
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