As a homeowner, you invest time and money into making your home look good during the day and often overlook it's evening opportunities. Low voltage landscape lighting can extend your home's curb appeal after hours.
Exterior lighting can be added virtually anywhere and custom designed to serve multiple purposes. Illuminating walkways and paths to make the outdoors safer, highlight focal points of your property, and help you use a landscaped area more often. Here are some outdoor lighting ideas for exterior of your home and boosting its appeal after hours...
Highlight Walkways and Paths:
Lighting walkways, paths, and steps are some essential areas to highlight. This will help you and your guests safely navigate through your property at night. There are several options for lighting these areas, some common techniques include downlighting from nearby trees or using pathlights as shown above. For downlighting, fixtures are installed into a tree and shining down onto the space. With path lights, the light fixture will be much closer to the ground. These lighting techniques can also be used to light a driveway.
Focus on the Front of Your Home:
Highlighting the architectural features of your home and its entry points helps make your home more welcoming for guests and deters would-be intruders. The soft light increases its security without using the harsh, high powered lights that disturb the neighbors and devalue your property. In addition, lighting the front of your house helps boost its curb appeal at night.
Light Up Your Trees and Landscape:
Lighting a tree at the far ends of the yard makes the property seem more expansive. You could light a group of trees in odd numbers or be strategic and conservative in which trees you pick to light. If you light all the trees in your line of sight, your yard could end up looking like a holiday light show. Besides enhancing the beauty of your landscape, light helps extend the time spent outdoors. With a properly lit yard, people are more likely to spend more time outdoors after its dark.
Get More Use Out of Your Outdoor Living Spaces:
Lighting can be used to illuminate specific areas on a deck or patio, such as railings, seating areas, or an outdoor cooking area, as well as adding interest to built-in elements such as a gazebo or pergola. The soft, ambient lighting creates an appealing atmosphere for entertaining, relaxing, or both. With the right outdoor lighting, you can enhance these long, leisurely evenings outdoors.
When considering adding landscape lighting to your home, walk around your property after dark. Make notes of areas that you use frequently or would use more often if adequately lit, areas an intruder could hide, or where safety is a concern. Download and use our checklist as a guide. Move towards adding light to whichever areas have a higher priority on your list. You can always add more light as you need or want later on.
Knowing how and what to light outdoors, which fixtures and techniques to use, and how to light for both beauty and security, takes education, expertise, experience and acumen.
Looking to Enhance Your Property?
Our dedicated team at McKay Landscape Lighting works with you to create a custom landscape lighting design that's unique to your property. From design to installation to service, you can count on our team of experts to make sure you are happy with your lighting system for years to come.
