I am trying to decide on some lighting for the front of my house. I've done plenty of landscape lighting before, but always set in the ground, and I think for this situation I need to actually mount something on the house. The problem is that while the front porch and driveway have lighting/definition at night, it looks kind of weird because the upper half of the house is a black void in comparison. Pic attached from when it was built -- I'm talking especially about the part above the porch roof. We're in the city with essentially no front yard, so there's only about four feet of grass in front of the front porch as you can see, so I can't really get any "distance" from the house with lighting. My goals are: 1. Provide some illumination of the second story walls so it's not a black void at night 2. Illuminate the front landscaping (the plants are now larger than what's in this pic, this was from a couple years ago). Note that the porch has recessed can lights that light up that area, and there's an up/down carriage light on the far side of the garage. For goal #1, I think the ideal would be to have some soft wall-washers/small spots under the soffits on the second floor, but I don't know how practical that is or what kind I would use. I've also thought about mounting some kind of light on the gutters of the front porch roof that are aimed back at that second story wall, but I don't know if that would look all that great, plus I'm worried about shining lights directly into those windows (they have shades of course, but still). For goal #2, I'm thinking of having some uplights on the arborvitae and evergreen on the left, and then...some kind of floods for the shrubs? Would appreciate recommendations here.
Hi, M. Rogers. I've diagrammed your photo to show you one possible approach. If you don't think you'll like the appearance of gutter mounted lights, puck lights in the locations I've suggested on the upper level. I'd also consider illuminate the porch columns. The orange graphics represents other options to consider in addition to those indicated by yellow graphics. One of the biggest decisions to make before designing your plan is how much light you want in your plan overall. You want to think in terms of how you'll likely use your lighting. will you run them all night? Are there light intrusion concerns to be considered? You also want to think about whether or not you'll make your house lights work with your landscape lighting. That might mean you'll want to have more or fewer fixtures. For instance, you might think the wall sconce to the right of the garage illuminates that section of the house just the way you like. Alternatively, you could decide you want to put a soffit fixturet or uplight. On the left side of the house, I like the idea of uplighting or floodlighting the group of arborvitae and projecting the silhouette onto the front left corner of the house. Again, depending on how much overall light you want, you could also uplight the area in orange. Alternatively, you could illuminate the small conifer and either the arborvitae or the wall section to the left of the porch. Point I would emphasize is that illuminating all three of those areas I think could be too much lighting concentrated into one relatively small area. But lighting levels are a personal preference and you shouldn't feel 100% bound by any of my suggestions. My philosophy is that less is more. For instance, I might light the three arborvitae and the group of shrubs to the right of the front porch. I generally encourage people to resist the urge to illuminate all of your favorite flowers, shrubs and trees. Besides, one of the most satisfying parts to landscape lighting is seeing a home or other property transformed after dark. Hope this helps to get you started.
