Looking for landscape lighting help. Been pondering this for some time but not sure where to start, what bulbs to use, lights to use, etc. Looking up ideas is great but lacks guidance. Here is a pic of my home.
Hey, Kevin. It's nice to get a softball every once in a while. I diagrammed your photo to show one possible approach to lighting your home. At a minimum, I think you should consider illuminating the sections indicated by the yellow graphics on your house. Lighting those sections will highlight the staggered brickwork on the corners of your house and overall contours of your house. Depending on how much light you want to introduce to your property overall, you could also consider lighting the gabled sections above and to the left of your front door. For most of those sections, I recommend a spotlight beam spread of no more than 38°. For that narrow brick section immediately to the left of your front door, I think a beam spread of 20° max. Would be best. If all of that seems like a lot of light on your house, you could also go that narrow on the other first level sections of your, focusing primarily on the brick work. If desired, you could place path lights (indicated by blue ovals) and/or compact flood lights (orange graphics) on those shrubs. In the second approach I mentioned, basically you'd have less light focused directly on the house and the path and/or compact floods would light the house more indirectly. If you read back over the feedback I've given here, and check out some of the how to articles on the VOLT website, I think you'll find that many of the questions you've asked have been addressed. It's a fairly straightforward roadmap. You want to illuminate the general contours of your home and there are multiple ways of doing that. Btw, for those upper level sections, I would recommend compact spot lights vs the regular sized ones you'll want to use for your ground level. For one thing, those sections are smaller and the light doesn't have to travel as far. But smaller fixtures will be more discreet, if that's a concern you have. Hope this helps to get you started. I also highly recommend that you take a look at landscape lighting examples from VOLT site, elsewhere online and in your neighborhood to get a sense of how much coverage you want and what brightness levels you'll be comfortable with. HTH
Thank you very much for the recommendations. I really like lifting idea on the house to showcase the raised brick edges. What I neglected to mention as I was in a hurry, there is a patio behind the bushes just under the window to the left of the front door. With that being said, do you have a spot light that can mount to concrete? Also, would adding a couple ground lights in addition to the lighting on the brick be overkill.
Glad to help, Kevin. Full disclosure, I'm just another landscape lighting enthusiast like yourself. The thing to keep in mind is that landscape lighting is a form of art. There's no one single perfect way to light a house or landscape so I try to avoid telling people what they should or shouldn't do. Having said that, I've attached a handful of photos to demonstrate that there's any number of different ways to light a house in a compelling way. You'll notice how some of these houses just have columns illuminated. Others have almost the full facade illuminated. But as you can see, there's different looks and moods for all of these homes. I've stated repeatedly in my feedback that I think less is more and that's especially true when a home is sited fairly relatively close to the sidewalk or a walkway and when there's not a lot of ambient light. If you're planning to leave your lights on from dusk til dawn and you don't have curtains or blinds, you may want to consider going with fewer fixtures overall or lower lumens lamps for your fixtures. To answer your question about attaching lights to concrete, you can do this fairly easily. In fact, I have some fixtures attached to the wall above my portico highlighting brickwork on my second level. The architectural term for those staggered bricks or stones is "quoin" I believe. Again, I strongly encourage you to explore the site and check out some of the guides like the one I've linked below. I think you'll also find it helpful to look over some of different lighting fixtures, transformers, etc to get a better sense of all your options. Hope this helps. https://www.voltlighting.com/learn/landscape-lighting-design-style
