Thanks in advance for your advice! Would you please tell me what lights to purchase & where to place them? My head is spinning like the Daytona 500 trying to figure this out! Totally out of my wheelhouse, here!
Wonderful house and landscaping, Chris. There's numerous ways you could create a compelling and cohesive lighting plan but hopefully you'll be able to experiment some and have fun with the process. I've diagrammed your photos to give you some ideas for how to come up with your own plan. Think about what most remarkable about your home, think about what you want to see when the lights come on at night and think about what you want others to see when they visit your house. You've probably already considered lighting that cool serpentine retaining wall, your flag, that tree with the broad umbrella like canopy, and the ornamental grass garden at the base of the flag. On your house, you'll obviously want to highlight the largest sections of brick and siding but, again, there's multiple approaches to doing it. For instance, you could light the sections of brick flanking that arched window to show off that great brick work or you could instead light those same sections indirectly by illuminating the pair of narrow shrubs and projecting their shadows onto the wall. Same is true for the section of siding immediately to the left of that bricked section. You could uplight the house behind the tree or you could uplight the tree in a way that its shadow is projected on the side of the house. I'm also recommending puck lights to illuminate your garage doors and I'd recommend you illuminate the siding in the areas I've indicated. Because I couldn't possibly tell you all of the things you'll want to consider before you create your lighting plan, I will suggest that you check out the VOLT site galleries to see some completed projects (for inspiration) and also review some of the how to articles and videos. You should also have a look at some of the dozens and dozens of forum posts to get an idea of how you might create a unique lighting plan for your own home and landscaping.
This is exactly what I was searching for to get started. Thank you so much for taking the time to give such a detailed reply. I’m sure I’ll be back with more questions in the weeks to come!