Extend the Enjoyment of your Landscape Lighting

Your home is the single biggest investment you'll ever make. Your home is your castle and your yard is your domain. But for a good part of the year by the time you get home from work your yard is dark. You can't see the landscaping at all, and the house just fades into the night. More and more people are finding that architectural and landscape lighting allows them to extend the enjoyment of their landscape investment into the evening hours. The right lighting creates a warm and welcoming atmosphere for the exterior of your home and your yard. You'll even enjoy the lighting from inside.

You can enhance the ambiance of your property at night with low-voltage landscape lighting of trees, shrubs and flowers. You can also increase safety by lighting up stairs, driveways and walkways.

Just like the new low-voltage recessed lighting that many homeowners are using inside their homes to save money as energy costs rise, low voltage landscape lighting is available for outdoors, that uses only 12 volts of electricity. This type of lighting is energy efficient, safe to install, and offers better control of light than 120 Volt builders style lighting.

A certified Lighting One designer can easily create a lighting plan by choosing one or two points of interest and making these the centerpiece of your landscape lighting display, and then building the rest of your lighting plan around your focal points. Unique landscape features, such as sculptures and shaped shrubbery, can be highlighted using spotlights, or a sequence of spotlights can create an interesting mosaic of colors and textures. In addition, up lighting adds visual interest to objects such as trees, bushes, statues and fountains.

Other techniques include the use of path lighting to illuminate the areas where people walk or drive, which adds safety as well as beauty. Floodlighting is also a versatile technique used for illuminating a wide range of features including walls, garden ponds or gazebos.

Use silhouetting to provide dramatic effects on a broad surface, like a wall, behind a landscape feature such as bushes. Wall lighting can be incorporated into a wall that a building, pool or walkway area for added visibility.

Many homeowners let their landscaper or electrician design their landscape lighting, but these people aren't the experts in this field. For the best results and maximum energy savings, a certified lighting designer, trained by Lighting One University or the American Lighting Association, should design your landscape lighting. Whether designing landscape lighting or interior lighting, lighting designers are more familiar with the current trends in lighting and use the most energy-efficient lighting products.

Although a homeowner can easily install a small job, on a major exterior renovation a licensed electrician should be used. A well-planned landscape lighting job will encourage more use of your outdoor property and enhance the value of your home.


Written by Philip Finkelstein, a Lighting One certified lighting designer, and owner of Illuminations in Rockville Centre, NY for the past 30 years. To locate the Lighting One showroom nearest you, visit http://www.lighting-one.com/.