Great outdoor lighting design doesn’t have to be the just in the realm of anyone who can afford to hire expensive landscape architects. You can light your home and property beautifully and effectively with just some knowledge of outdoor landscape lighting principles and a simple plan that you can draw up yourself. Just make sure to plan everything out and don’t overlight your garden, the most common mistake of most amateur lighting plans.
Your landscape lighting should hold in perfect balance the need for functionality, safety, and aesthetics. This may sound simple on paper, but it’s much harder to implement in practice. The number one mistake that most people make when they’re trying to accomplish this is they will install too many lights or lights that are too powerful. Not only does this ruin your landscape lighting, it might even put you in violation of any dark skies laws that your neighborhood may have. To avoid spraying too much light on your landscape follow these simple tips.
- Use dimmer lights. Lights don’t need to be bright to be effective.
- Use reflectors, deflectors, or covers to direct the lights. This will make sure that you get light right where you want it and nowhere else. It will also focus the beam and allow you to use dimmer light fixtures, saving you on electricity.
- Use timers or motion sensors to turn on and off lights.
Drawing Up Your Lighting Plan
Now that you know a few general lighting tips, it’s time for you to start drawing up your lighting plan. The first thing that’s necessary is to draw your property along with all the pathways, plants, and other objects you intend to light. Include your home, any entrances, and electrical outlets that you might use. Then, mark the points that you would like to have illuminated.
Once you’ve marked the points that you want to have illuminated, draw in the light fixtures and the direction you would like them to cast light. You can use one of several popular lighting techniques to generate light. These include:
- Up lighting – best used to draw attention to trees, walls, and other large plants or structures. It is done by staking an outdoor flood light into the ground and pointing it straight up into the air. Make sure you don’t place the light where anyone might end up looking directly into the beam, injuring their eyes.
- Down lighting – placing light on a pole, edge of house, in a tree, or on another tall object and casting light down. This mimics the way the sun or the moon casts light onto the Earth and is useful when you have large areas that need lit.
- Backlighting – Placing a light behind an object to create a silhouette. This effect works very well on trees.
Choosing Light Fixtures
Once you have decided on where you will place your lights and how you will orient them, the next step in outdoor lighting design is to choose light fixtures. You can choose almost any light fixture you want, but you should keep two things in mind when you do so: the style of your home and the mood you want to set in your landscape. The style of your house is important because ideally you should create a sense of harmony between your lights and home. If you have a home done in the English Tudor style, installing light fixtures molded in the Spanish Mission style won’t make much sense. You should also take into account what mood you want to set so that your lights all match congruently with each other and create the same ambiance.
Those are all the steps that are necessary for you to begin designing your outdoor garden lights. With just keeping these principles and techniques in mind, you should be able to design a professional-looking lighting style yourself without having to hire an expensive contractor or landscape architect.
