Interested in Pathway lights and using uplighting/spots on House. Looking for a “soft” illumination, not overall bright. Trying to understand proper beam usage as well as lumens to keep light softer and also eliminate glare from doorway and windows. There is a small beech tree on the left side front corner of landscaping that is a bit hard to see in these photos. Two large Holly trees are a focal point and want to eventually upright these. The front beds by walkway are planted with mini hydrangeas which will fill most of the space. Would like to light column that might go all the way up to roof line or above. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and recommendations.
Hi, kitty. I’ve diagrammed one of your photos to demonstrate one possible approach to lighting your home. This is a very accessible plan that highlights the more remarkable architectural features including the brickwork at corners, your columns and the lighter colored areas (gable and dormers). I originally meant to indicate a light for the wall section below and to the right of the first level dormer closer to the main part of your house. But if you’re erring on the conservative side (as it seems you’re indicating), I don’t think you’ll lose anything by omitting a light there. In fact, if you wanted to, it’d be fairly easy to really trick out your house by light that area, the area between the two windows on that smaller section of your house, your flag, and the area between the pairs of windows on the main part of your house. But my mindset is that sometimes more is less and I’ve always liked the idea of leaving certain areas of a house and landscape unlit. That way, the viewer is invited to sort of fill in the blanks, so to speak. If you stick with fairly narrow beam spreads (+/- 15° to 20°) for all areas accept for the gable (a 60° should be ideal there, imo) and keep your lumens no higher than 3W, I think you’ll end up with a coherent, and compelling plan that doesn’t overpower the facade of your house. I actually think 2W spotlights in all of those locations would be ideal. Unfortunately, VOLT doesn’t make configuring narrow beam spotlights in the 2W range as straightforward as it could be, imho. The spotlight I recommend most often is the regular sized version of the Top Dog. IMO, this is the most versatile and configurable of all of the spotlight models VOLT sells. In order to avoid your windows and avoid introducing more light than you want to your property overall, I think you may want to go with adjustable beam spread lamps for your Top Dog fixtures and you also might need to use frosted lenses and/or hex louvre filters to tweak your light output and your beam spreads. The blue circles indicate possible locations where you might place path lights. Unfortunately, from your photos, I don’t have a clear sense of how long or wide your walkway is. The specific path lights fixtures you choose will depend on whether you want your walkway fully illuminated or you want to illuminate it with distinct pools of light with some space in between. So, for example, if the main length of your walkway leading from the house is 20 ft, you could choose to use just a couple of path lights with very wide beam spreads (like the Max spread pathlight) or you could use more fixtures with smaller beam spreads to light your path in a slightly different way. It sounds like you have a few different trees and shrubs in mind to light. My advice to you is to choose wattages in the 1.5W to 2W range and try to vary your lighting techniques to add interest to your plan. For example, you could leave that conifer there in the front unlit (so that it’s silhouetted by the illuminated wall section behind it, you could front light it with a single spotlight or floodlight or you could flank it with two spotlights (for a more three dimensional effect). Whichever trees and shrubs you choose to highlight, try to use different techniques throughout (rather than simply uplighting everything), to give your plan complexity. Btw, I really like the different layers and rows of shrubbery in your front yard and I encourage you to highlight the different areas (and you can do this as subtly as you want) that display this structure at night. HTH to get you started.
