The landscape of your client’s home is a thing of beauty and it should be celebrated. Proper and professional outdoor lighting can bring any landscape from boring, scary, or even dangerous to beautiful, vivacious, and attractive at all times of the night. Certain lighting strategies such as low-lying lights, moonlighting, string lights, and submersible lighting can be the difference between an attractive backyard and one that hardly anyone visits. Here’s a contractor’s guide at bringing a landscape to life with outdoor lighting in Cortlandt Manor and Briarcliff Manor, NY areas.
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Eliminate Floodlighting
A single floodlight that covers a large space needs a ton of energy and ends up having very low effective coverage. The single source of light creates harsh shadows and bright glares that make for dangerous passage for anyone walking away from the light, and a blinding glare when walking toward the light. The unpleasant and inefficient brightness of a backyard floodlight should be updated to an eco-conscious lighting system that softly illuminates specific areas like walkways and patio surfaces and increases attractiveness, decreases electricity use, and enables a safer environment. Opting for a system with LED lighting will be the answer to all of these issues.
Utilize Space
While a few parts of your client’s landscape won’t be used very much at night, directing the proper lighting to common nighttime gathering places will make all the difference. Patios, pools, pavilions, and especially walkways should be given priority for safety reasons. All other landscape features may be either spotlighted or subtly illuminated for aesthetics and textures. Use strategic lighting with input from your clients to see how they use their backyard.
Highlight Plant Life
The plant life in your client’s backyard should receive careful attention when planning lighting whether certain plants receive lighting or not. The colors of every feature have different hues at night and tasteful decisions can make a huge impact on nighttime ambiance. Shrubs such as boxwoods are often used to create a living wall along a walkway (much like a hedge), and uplighting these shrubs makes a dramatic atmosphere. Any large landmark trees such as big oaks should be featured as a highlight of your client’s outdoor living space.
Other Lighting Strategies
Low-Lying Light Fixtures: Keeping a backyard illuminated at night is the best way to increase safety and even walking on a familiar surface can be sometimes dangerous. Placing LED lights near the ground helps utilize their energy and doesn’t send glaring light to anyone walking.
Moonlighting: Similar to the practice of spotlighting, places light fixtures in a tree and angled toward the ground. The canopy of the tree scatters the light and makes an interesting visual texture on the surfaces below for a romantic effect. It’s a great way to mimic the natural light of the moon even on cloudy nights.
String Lighting: Creating a festive experience can be achieved by stringing lights between lampposts and other tall landscape features. It provides a soft glow that’s perfect for a party atmosphere. Low-energy LED lights are perfect to achieve an eco-conscious yet fun vibe.
Submersible Lighting: Water features in your client’s backyard should be one of the stars of the show when it comes to nighttime landscape lighting. Placing lights underwater will provide a soft blue glow and cause the reflection of any ripples to “dance” on any vertical surface.
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