How Landscape Lighting Enhances Your Outdoor Space
For most homeowners, landscape lighting may not be at the top of their home design to-do list. However, it shouldn’t be an afterthought either.
Landscape and exterior lighting can make or break your outdoor space. When done correctly, your landscape lighting can offer numerous benefits that enhance your garden and outdoor space. This article enumerates several advantages to using landscape lighting as well as tips and strategies on how to use it to boost your outdoor space.
Why Landscape Lighting? 7 Benefits You Need To Know
1. It Helps Maximize Outdoor Use
First and foremost, the number one reason why you should consider lighting up your landscaping and outdoor living space is to make it usable even after the sun goes down. Today’s outdoor areas have become extensions of most homes with outdoor lounging areas, dining spaces, and kitchens.
Without a well-planned landscape and outdoor lighting, you’ll be fumbling around in the dark instead of enjoying the space to the fullest. Landscape lighting allows you to brighten a large portion of your garden or simply set a scene for a relaxing night on the porch. This gives you more time to bond with your family and loved ones or entertain guests while having or after dinner.
2. It Allows You To Highlight Outdoor Aesthetic At Night
You’ve probably put a lot of money and effort into your home’s landscaping and exterior design. So, why would you let it all disappear in the dark after sundown? With the help of professionals like Oregon Outdoor Lighting, you can roll back the darkness and highlight your home’s appeal even at nighttime.
Landscape lighting can enhance your home’s exterior design and curb appeal, illuminating pathways, focal points, and functional items such as hot tubs and creating a captivating ambience. With strategically placed lights, you can accentuate the best features of your landscaping—whether it’s a beautiful tree, plant arrangement, flower beds, or a water feature. A well-lit property can help your home stand out from your neighborhood.
3. It Improves Your Property’s Security
One of the most important reasons to invest in good landscaping lighting is to improve your property’s overall security and deter crime after dark.
Burglary is one of the most common threats to your home and property. According to Forbes, over a million burglaries occur annually in the US. Criminals love the dark corners of your property to hide their malicious activities.
Proper outdoor lighting is a critical element of any effective security strategy. A well-lit property can deter these criminals from even trying to break into your home, and it also shows people that your home is well-designed and cared for.
This can help deter theft and trespassing since well-lit outdoor spaces make burglars highly visible. Thus, you don’t want to skimp on lighting your outdoor space, ensuring no dark areas where criminals can hide.
If you’re worried about your utility bills, you can use lights with motion sensors that only light up when people are in range. This helps save you money and surprises malicious elements who try to trespass on your property.
4. It Ensures Personal Safety
Aside from frightening off criminals, the suitable landscape and exterior lights can help keep you, your family, and your guests safe while moving outside after sundown.
With a combination of landscape and exterior lighting, you can illuminate walkways, paths, entrances and exits, and driveways. If you have stairs to decks, proper lighting ensures you can safely navigate your way.
The lights will guide people at night, preventing injuries from twisting ankles or falling. It’s essential to install enough outdoor lighting in high-traffic areas, such as decks or patios, and high-risk areas, including pools or docks, especially if you live near lakes.
Watch this YouTube video on how to light a dock properly:
5. It Boosts Your Home’s Value
Regardless of the style or size of your home, outdoor and landscape lighting can emphasize and illuminate its best attributes, adding space, dimension, and dynamic form. In fact, well-planned landscape lighting can make even the most boring exteriors shine and come to life.
In addition to all the benefits mentioned above, a well-lit outdoor living space can increase your home’s value. Overall, it makes your home look more functional and attractive, drawing the eyes of potential homebuyers when passing by.
In fact, according to statistics, up to 90% of potential buyers rated outdoor and landscape lighting as either ‘essential’ or ‘desirable,’ showing just how important of a factor it is to your home’s value.
Incorporating highly in-demand features like this into your home can make it more likely to sell quickly when the time comes.
6. It Enhances Smart Home Capabilities
Technology has made our daily lives more convenient and more manageable, and it’s no different with landscape lighting. Today, the most advanced landscape and outdoor lighting systems can be controlled from your smartphone, making it simpler than ever. This allows you to enjoy time outside instead of spending time switching on lights and getting things ready.
You can preset all controls on your mobile device, so all you need to do is to tap a button to control various zones, change the brightness of lights, and even allow changing colors. Most landscape lighting has color-changing capabilities, so you can create themes for holiday decorations or parties. This kind of customization offers a good dose of wow factor.
7. It Is Cost-Effective
With the rising cost of utility bills, most homeowners are looking for ways to reduce their energy use. As such, lighting up their landscape and exterior may seem like a waste of money. However, it’s worth noting that modern landscape lighting is highly energy-efficient, especially if you opt for light-emitting diode (LED) lighting.
What’s more, with the increasing popularity of solar energy, you can reduce energy use from your landscape lighting with solar outdoor lights. These types of lighting fixture store solar energy during the day and automatically light up your outdoor space during the night.
Landscape Lighting 101: Tips To Use It To Enhance Your Home’s Exterior
Now that you know how landscape lighting benefits your home, this section shares how to properly plan, design, and use it to boost your home’s exterior.
1. Always Work With A Professional
For most homeowners, designing outdoor space lighting seems like a pretty straightforward task. As such, they choose a DIY route in designing and installing landscape lighting. However, if you want to go from ‘okay’ lighting to landscape lighting with a ‘wow’ factor, working with an expert outdoor lighting designer and installer is your best choice.
Working with a professional ensures that your landscape lighting project turns out how you envisioned it. Although it may seem easy, outdoor lighting can be complicated and confusing. An outdoor lighting specialist will have an eye for the right design, unique to your landscape. Not only that, but they’re also experienced in things such as energy efficiency, drainage issues, and safety.
2. Determine The Kind And Amount Of Light You Need
With the help of a professional, you can start planning your landscape lighting. The first thing you need to do is to determine what kind of light you need and how much.
In general, there are numerous types of lighting you can choose from. However, they are often categorized into three:
– General Lighting
Also known as ambient lighting, this type of light illuminates the space so you can see what you’re doing and move around safely. General outdoor lighting includes pathway lighting, stairway lights, pin lights, and wall or post lamps.
– Task Lighting
This type of lighting is used when you need to light up specific areas for specific purposes. For instance, you can have a standing lamp next to your outdoor furniture or pendant lights that provide increased visibility in outdoor kitchens.
– Accent Lighting
Accent lighting is similar to task lighting since it helps provide targeted light to a specific area or item. However, its primary purpose is to be decorative instead of functional. Dimmable lights or spotlights can highlight a key feature in your garden, such as a fountain or trees. This type of lighting can have a significant effect on both the look and feel of the space.
String lights and lanterns are other popular options for landscape accent lighting, invoking a warm and intimate feel for entertaining spaces such as outdoor dining areas.
3. Layer Lights
Ideally, you’ll need to include each type of lighting in your landscaping. Placement will depend on where you’ll spend the most and the features you wish to highlight.
Make sure to layer the light by adding various accent touches. Also, you can mix and match different shapes, styles, and brightness.
Takeaway
As you can see, landscape lighting can bring life to your outdoor space and façade and offer you numerous benefits. Take note, however, that only with a well-planned landscape lighting design will you be able to enjoy the benefits mentioned above.
As such, implementing the few tips mentioned above can ensure that you’re getting the most out of your landscape lighting project.
- by Matt Watts
