I am hoping you could provide some advice for my upcoming exterior illumination project. The far away pic shows the front yard with 4 large trees that I am planning to illuminate with a yet to be determined Volt spotlight that houses a 15 degree angle bulb (suggestions)? I am having much more trouble deciding on what to accentuate on the actual house. Do I highlight the shrubs that flank the front porch with some wide angle spotlights from underneath? Do I attempt to highlight the beams of the porch even though they are so skinny? Do I include the front of the garage even though it is partially blocked by shrubs? Do I use a floodlight on the ground to accentuate the peak (I will be replacing the large window soon). Any advice / clarity you could provide would be truly appreciated.
Hi AC. My philosophy is that you light the house and garden features that are most remarkable or that you love the most. When windows and shutters fill up most of the facade of a house, lighting can be tricky. In your case, I'd recommend surface mount or core drilled puck lights in the locations indicated on the photo of yours I diagrammed. I'd also recommend a gutter mount mini-spot light with a 60° beam spread for the 2nd story gable. That's the overall approach I'd take for lighting the house. If puck lights were not an option, I'd probably use a few gutter mounted spotlights (3 evenly spaced spots with about 60° beam spread should work) to light the upper facade and 3 stake mounted spotlights (38°) for the siding on the garage. The border garden behind that blue chair caught my eye. You could use a flood light to accent that area (as I've indicated in the photo) or the shrubs flanking your porch. Speaking of your porch, you can always make your wall sconces part of your lighting scheme. I often recommend lowering the wattage on porch lights so they don't "wash out" the effects of your landscape lighting. For those huge trees in the other photo, I'd recommend 38° for the tree trunks and at least 60° for spotlights or well lights that are placed away from the base of the tree (to light the canopy of the tree from below). Because you have so many trees, I hope you will have fun and explore different lighting techniques. For instance, I can see from the shadows on your lawn that lights placed high in those trees would create a stunning moonlighting effect. Where the leaves on a tree or shrub are so dark and dense that uplighting is not ideal, you can flank the trees with spotlights or well lights placed some distance away from the base of the tree. Finally, I highly recommend that you look back at past threads to see some of the recommendations Evan and others have made for a variety of architecture and landscape types.
