By Lucy Dearborn, Lucia Lighting & Design
Landscape lighting helps you expand your home to the outdoors. As we invest in our landscape, either by a total renovation or just a few new plants and trees, we can light up those favorite features for round the clock enjoyment!
A great place to start when you are considering landscape lighting is to decide how you are using spaces and what are the features in your home that most deserved to be lit? Is it the pathway to your front door? Or would you fancy looking out your kitchen window where you’ll be entertaining at night? Consider uplighting trees to highlight interesting branches and silhouettes.
Design a plan with a lighting specialist. A professional can help you formulate a plan that evolves over time, allowing you to add beauty, safety and security progressively.
General Lighting: Wall lights and post lights for general illumination around entries, driveway & walkways.
Accent Lighting: Lighting hardscapes, focal points and architectural elements are a great way to extend your home and your day.
- Up lighting trees, rocks, sculptures
- Grazing surfaces (brick, stone)
- Bed lighting to highlight plants and add a layer of glow
- Light up brick and cobblestone walkways, both for safety and to accentuate a winding path or interesting surface.
Task Lighting: If you’d like to turn on your lights from your car for safety and security or if you’d like to change light levels from your chaise, you can control your outdoor living environments much like your interior. Scenes can be created for every mood from reading to romance.
- Walkway/pathway lighting – safely light areas of travel from space to space
- Not too symmetrical, they do not have to be equally spaced
- Lighting steps and stairways – side posts or step lighting (light every step!)
Security: Landscape lighting allows you to move safely around your outdoor spaces after the sun goes down. Landscape lighting is as pretty in the winter as it is functional in the summer. Driving up to a well-lit home makes you feel good and lights the way to the inside safely.
- Motion sensors and photocell control are self-controlled and simplify security lighting.
Why LED?
Use low voltage LED Lighting for ease of installation by your qualified contractor. It uses up to 90% less energy than conventional lighting. 50,000 hour lamps life offers a low maintenance solution so your landscape can stay lit for safety, security and beauty for a lifetime.
Ask your lighting specialist about energy efficient retrofits. She can retrofit LED bulbs in your current working landscape fixtures. You will use up to 90% less energy and almost never change a bulb.
- Up to 90% energy savings
- Rarely, if ever changing the lightbulbs
- Cool burning lamp source that accepts lenses to change color from warm to cool
- Pink lenses for white & pink trees
- Blue lenses for green trees
LAST BUT NOT LEAST: A little light goes a long way at night ~ soft layers, low wattage.
