Hi. I’m happy to find this forum and vendor for some exterior lights. We bought this house several years ago, and haven’t yet done much to the outside. While we’re deciding on some long term landscape plans, I’m hoping to improve on the lighting around the house in the short term. All we have now is a few porch lights and some ugly security lights near the house corners that I’d like to do away with. The house sits about 200’ back from the street, in pretty big yard with numerous trees. While it may seem that we’re on the outskirts of town because of the trees & lot size, the street in front is actually pretty busy and directly across the street is a fairly new $85 million office complex. https://www.google.com/maps/place/9...2!3d38.9572181!4d-94.5948919?hl=en&authuser=0 I’m assuming some uplighting and downlighting around the house perimeter, but not really sure how many and which ones. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks, Kevin
Welcome, Kevin. I often offer a “recipe” for an overall lighting plan but with all the unique vantage points and remarkable architectural features of your home, I’ll just make a handful of observations and suggestions. Ultimately, it’ll be up to you to decide which aspects of the house you want to highlight and how best to do that. Think about what you parts you really like and what lighting approaches might show them off best. The house has the ideal architecture for soffit lighting. On the front side of your house, you could install soffit lights that would illuminate those walls and the shrubbery immediately beneath. You might also chose to emphasize the lighter wall regions by placing uplight or flood lights on the walls behind the shrubbery. One of the first things that caught my attention is the columnar aspect of the architecture on that front side. The chimney on my house shares a wall with a fair amount of utility wiring so it’s not something I would want to highlight. You, OTOH have this bold, double decker chimney that’s just begging to be uplit. If the trees in your front yard are tall enough, you might even want to consider some moonlighting that would bathe the whole front yard in light. You could also install soffit lighting on both the garage and bedroom sides of the house or you could choose to uplight those broad swaths of walls on the bedroom side. Finally, even though you indicated you’re focusing on illuminating the house first, I like to remind people to take advantage of foundation plants, shrubs, and trees as opportunities to indirectly light regions of their homes. Hope some of this helps.
@Mesodude made some excellent recommendations. An alternative to those soffit lights --if you didn't fancy downlighting-- could be some classic path lights down that walkway (possibly placed on extension risers to raise them above the shrubs) and some spotlights for the home's exterior walls. The only other thing I would have to add would be to recommend uplighting some of those large beautiful trees. The trees visible from the neighborhood street (if someone were driving by) would certainly be good trees to illuminate (photo attached). This also brings me to my next point about lighting generally being more of a final step in a landscape design. While the areas & objects Meso and I have marked may look like good targets now, after your redesigning and possibly planting new materials, the best spots/objects may very well change. A final recommendation would be to at least get a solid idea of the goal landscape you want and plan for that now rather than buying for what you have now and having to tediously rework over time to adjust to your goal design gradually. An example would be perhaps you wanted to cut down that tree on the corner of the garage in the 'near' future so, a recommendation to illuminate it would be redundant. On the other hand, we know you will have that front walkway for the life of the house more than likely and perhaps you know you will want to keep those shrubs there or at least update with others so, buying the soffit lights or path lights in this scenario wouldn't be redundant. Getting more of an idea on the final landscape goal will definitely help simplify the designing and purchasing process overall.
