Hi everyone, I’m looking for some advice on designing my landscaping, and I’d love to hear your suggestions! I have some general ideas, but I’ve seen some amazing advice in other threads and was hoping for something similar here. Here’s what I’m working with: 1. Existing plants: Cherry laurels, sunshine ligustrum, lemon lime nandina, and loropetalum. 2. Current layout: Beds around the house, a central tree, and a flag near the driveway. Here’s what I’m thinking so far: 1. Path lights scattered along the beds for ambiance and safety. 2. Spotlights to highlight architectural features (like columns by the garage) and possibly uplight the crepe myrtle in the front yard. 3. Considering lighting the flag and maybe incorporating some subtle lighting along the fence line for depth. I’d love to hear your thoughts on: • Placement ideas for the lights to create a balanced but striking look. • Recommendations on fixtues • Any creative ideas I might be overlooking! Looking forward to your suggestions. Thanks in advance for your help! Let me know if you want to add any specific details or adjust this further!
Hi, Jay. Want to first let you know I’m a landscape lighting enthusiast like yourself and don’t work for VOLT. I like many of your ideas and just want to offer a few tips to help guide you as you develop your plan. One thing I noticed right off is that your beam spreads are more or less the same. To add interest and complexity, I recommend that you consider configuring adjusting your beam spreads to correspond with the different sized regions of your house’s facade.The beam spreads on the right side of your house, for instance, will probably be at least triple that of the beam spread you’re using on the garage pillars. If I were you, I’d also consider adding some frosted lenses to your spots. This will soften the edges of your light output (see photo) so that and give your lighting a more refined and professional look. Ideally, you want to highlight the more remarkable features of your home’s facade and landscaping. Let’s highlight that cool brick work at the corners where your address numbers are. With a couple of spotlights there. You can highlight your flag, the brick work and your address number. Similarly, with some discreet spot lights, tucked into both of those gabled areas, you can highlight that circular raised brick work. You could even highlight your chimney. For your path lights, you can choose fixtures with wider or narrower output (blue ovals) to highlight more or less of your planting beds. Finally, you’re fortunate enough to have these nice deep soffits. They’re located low enough that, if you wanted to go with some or all downlights, adding soffit lighting would be a breeze. The great thing about soffit lighting is that you can easily light both facade and planting beds and even your walkways simultaneously. Hth to get you started.
Thank you so much for taking the time to put together such detailed feedback—it’s incredibly helpful and much appreciated! I do have a few questions to clarify if you don’t mind: 1. What specific fixtures do you recommend for the spot lights, pathway lighting, and the beds? 2. How many soffit lights would you suggest under the covered entry? 3. Where can I find the light diffusers or frosted lenses you mentioned? I really like your ideas for varying the beam spreads and highlighting key features like the chimney, gabled areas, and the address numbers. Your suggestions add a lot of depth and professionalism to the plan, and I’m excited to refine it further with these in mind. Thanks again for your guidance! Best, Jay
Glad to help Jay. Before I recommend specific fixture types and numbers of fixtures, I want to encourage you to think about how much overall light you want to include in your lighting plan. If you check out my most recent post to Jeff, I shared a few different landscape lighting photos that demonstrate the different moods one can create depending on brightness levels and fixture placement. Consider the overall look and feel you have in mind for your home. For instance, you have spotlights illuminating your garage door pillars. Will the sconces there be part of your lighting plan or will they only be on some of the time? If you illuminate that tree in front of your porch pillar there, will you still want/need those spotlights to illuminate it as well? Similarly, if you have soffit lighting on that right side of your house, will you still want to highlight the flower beds the same way you currently are? These are the kinds of questions to consider while you're developing your lighting plan. You asked about the number of puck lights I recommend under the covered entrance. My first impulse would be to tell you to center a soffit light to each side of the soffit area flanking that pillar. I think it might look cool to have a soffit light illuminating that tree from above. But if you do that, will you still want to illuminate that pillar? Or maybe you don't want to put any soffit lights there at all. If there's an overhead in front of your door or sconce there already, you could rely on that (something with fairly low lumens perhaps) and plan for "fill" lighting from nearby spotlights or path lights to ensure that that area of your house isn't in the dark. By now, maybe you can see where I'm going with this. Basically, I want you to think less in terms of fixture numbers or types and more in terms of the lumens or brightness level you want focused on any one area or on your whole property, for that matter. You've got path/area lights illuminating small groups of plants inside of the bed. If you want to focus on illuminating your walk way, you could install some path light fixtures with wider coverage and simultaneously illuminate part of your path way and part of a planting bed. Similarly, puck lights or soffit lights are available in different color temperatures as well as different brightness levels. Since there's a little more work involved than installing fixtures at ground level, you might want to experiment by purchasing one at the brightness level you think you'll want and then testing it out in some different areas where you're considering adding soffit lights. That way, you can make more informed decisions when you make a final purchase. Having said all that, for spotlight fixtures, if it's within your budget, I highly recommend the full size Top Dog Scotty. Why? Mainly because its customizability can't be beat. The fixture accepts a fairly wide range of lamp types as well as lenses and filter types. Basically whatever most of the other fixtures can do can be accomplished by configuring the Top Dog Scotty with the appropriate accessories. For path lights, again, that will depend on the amount of coverage you want. You can buy fixture model with a whopping 16 feet diameter beam spread down to fixtures that target a smaller area like those in your flower bed. There's no reason that they all have to be the same size. Purchase the fixture that accomplishes what you want to do for any given area of your yard or walkway. So hopefully I haven't totally overwhelmed you but what's important to remember is that you've got a wide variety of choices. I highly recommend that you explore the product section of VOLT's site to familiarize yourself with your options. Btw, it's there that you'll find the lenses and filter types that will enable you to refine the default light output of your fixtures and create any number of lighting effects. Really HTH.
Thank you so much! This is very helpful. This is my first time tackling a project like this, so I’d love a sanity check on my design. Here’s what I’m looking for feedback on: - Wiring and Placement: Do you see any issue with my wiring diagram? Im planning to run one wire to the roof to tackle the areas above the garage and front window and fireplace, and another wire along the ground for the rest of the lights. Suggestions for placement to get the best coverage and aesthetic effect? - Light Fixtures: Thoughts on the Top Dog Scotty spotlights and the 5W MR16 bulbs? Is this a good choice for ALL of the spotlights? or are there better options I should consider for differnt areas? Im going to get 7 of the surface mounts and a gutter mount as well. - Garage and Front Windows Lighting: For the area above the garage and front windows, I’m debating between two options: Installing two spotlights in the bottom corners aiming up. Adding a downlight in the peak instead. Which do you think would look better or provide more balanced lighting? what is the best fixture if i go with the single downlight in the peak? - I’d greatly appreciate any advice you can share. My goal is to create a cohesive, well-lit look without overdoing it. Thanks in advance for your feedback! Looking forward to hearing your suggestions!
Very nice graphics, Jay! So I'm going to try to answer all of your questions but I also want to give you a few more things to consider as you finalize your plan and determine the fixtures and accessories you'll need. First, I just want to remind you that I'm not a pro and I don't work for VOLT. I know what appeals to me and I have a good sense of my own lighting style. But I'm just one opinion and I encourage you to consider feedback from others as well. I like a more conservative approach than I think many others do. In short, take my recommendations with a grain of salt. IMHO, you've got a decent lighting plan overall. I think over time you may decide to tweak it by adding, removing, or moving your fixtures around. In general, your wiring plan is solid. Unless I'm mistaken, according to your diagram, your outdoor outlet is on the left side of your garage. If that's the case, if I were you, I would consider using hubs (possibly where I've placed stars on your diagram). As someone who hates troubleshooting and dealing with voltage calculation issues, I'm super partial towards hubs. They keep your connection above ground, they're easy to hide behind a small shrub or tree, they make it easy to guarantee that your fixtures will all be uniformly powered (and you won't ever deal with some lights being noticeably brighter than others. Hubs also make it easy to troubleshoot in the rare instances where you'd encounter any problems with your fixtures. One other advantage is that because hubs are a virtual power strip, you can usually reduce the number of wire connections needed to power your lights. For people new to lighting, I highly recommend hubs over daisy chaining and other wiring methods. With hubs, you might not be able to avoid using wire connectors entirely, but they can definitely make getting your system up and running a lot more quickly and efficiently. Consider the bottom example (where you're considering running a wire from your transformer all the way across the front of your roof to your chimney. I don't know what the distance is from your chimney to that starred area but an easier approach might be to connect that fixture (or fixtures, more on that in a bit) to the hub. Alternatively, you could daisy chain that chimney fixture to one of the two fixtures immediately below it. I notice that you're considering using the 300W slimline transformer. If it's in your budget and you're not buying it as part of a kit (which is the approach I recommend, btw), I strongly suggest that you instead go with one of the other 300W transformers. The VTR-300-SS-J1 would be my first alternate choice. Sure, those other transformers are heavier and bulkier. But if you see yourself at all adding on your system significantly or using longer wiring runs, I think you'll be glad you opted to spend a little bit more. The model I mention allows you to insert multiple wires under each tap and they also allow you more convenience and potentially smart lighting options. For instance, the larger transformers will accommodate the thicker astronomical timers which can be configured based on your time zone to turn your lights on and off at the astronomical dusk and dawn times where you are. It also eliminates the need to adjust the timer when DST rolls around. If you want to connect any kind of smart lighting to your transformer, having a few inches more wiggle room inside your transformer cabinet can make a difference. Of the two options you're considering for illuminating those two gables, I strongly favor placing a fixture in each of the bottom corners. The reason? First, with a fixture immediately below that on the ground aiming straight up, I'm not sure what the final effect will look like. Now, if you were to eliminate that middle fixture (which I think is worth considering anyway), you'd avoid that potential conflict. The other reason I favor using a pair of fixtures is that a downlight at the top of those gables will be considerably more noticeable at those heights than they would be on the soffits down below. While there's no iron clad rule about visible light sources, wherever possible, you want to try to hide your light source. It's one of those design touches, imo, that that can take a lighting plan from nice to sophisticated. Speaking of lighting brightness, my recommendation would be to go with either 2W on your trees and other features closer to the sidewalk and further away from the house and 3W on the house or 3W on the trees and features further away from the house and 5W (preferable with frosted lenses, which will reduce the light output slightly) on the house itself. If you have a decent night sky and no competition from streetlights or other ambient light, I would opt for the former approach. If you have street lights that might wash out the impact of your lights, you might want to go with the latter approach. Keep in mind, the light doesn't need to travel very high on your house so you could easily find that 5W feels like overkill. In the end, though, your personal preference is what matters most. One other thing I want to mention about lighting is that if you plan to have your lights on after bedtime and you don't have window treatments to block out the light, you might find the light intrusion after dark to be offensive. Just one other thing to keep in mind. The last thing I want to add is that I think you should consider flanking your larger trees and possibly your chimney with fixtures (even if you have to add them to your plan later). The reason? Uplighting a smaller shrub or immature tree (like the one next to the pillar near your front door) with one fixture is often adequate. For larger trees, a single fixture might not be enough to create as impressive an effect as you might want/need. The same is true for your chimney. The point I'm making is that you want to consider all the vantage points you want your lighting to be enjoyed from. Side lighting or uplighting the tree from two or more sides will give your lighting plan more depth and dimension. I've probably overwhelmed you with a lot more stuff to consider but I hope this helps with your decision making.
