Effective outdoor lighting techniques can show off your home’s finer features.
Outdoor lighting is a great way to spruce up your home during summer evenings, but you can’t just throw string lights around willy-nilly. Careful placement and precise lighting techniques are necessary to bringing out the best of your home at night. Here are a just a few effective lighting techniques that can brighten up your space.
Highlighting
An easy and common lighting technique is highlighting. By placing a spotlight or fixture beneath an outdoor feature you can draw attention to its finer details. Effective highlighting techniques use a variety of angles and distances to show off a landscape’s best aspects.
Wall Washing
Wall washing involves placing lighting fixtures, usually flood lights, sideways with a landscape feature. With wall washing you can create a smooth, even glow alongside walls or imbue your home with a subtle, ambient quality.
Silhouetting
Place lights behind outdoor features or directed to adjacent walls to create a silhouette, or illuminated backdrop. This technique is excellent for showcasing dense shrubbery, and looks particularly beautiful at sunset.
Shadowing
Similar to silhouetting, shadowing techniques involve positioning fixtures where light can reflect off a wall. Shadowing creates softer shadows and is great for illuminating foliage or objects that move, such as leaves and branches in the wind. You can create “dancing” shadows on the walls of your home.
Moonlighting and Downlighting
You can create a “moonlight” effect by placing light fixtures with a full glare guard angled toward the ground from within a tree or high up location. Moonlighting is great for emphasizing ground features and natural patterns. Downlighting is very similar. With downlighting, you can cast a brighter light over a larger area by placing fixtures up high. This is particularly useful for illuminating driveways.
Path-lighting, Accents and Contrast
It’s important to illuminate pathways, walkways and patios to guide you at night. Effective path lighting determines pacing. You can also create contrast by placing bold fixtures closer to a building or landscape feature. Accent lighting is a lot like highlighting, but angles light to focus on a feature’s finer details — such as a particular design or plant.
Outdoor Lighting from Lehnhoff’s Landscaping
Thinking about a summer landscaping project? Lehnhoff’s Landscaping offers professional and exceptional outdoor lighting, hardscaping, and landscaping year-round. We also offer dumpster rental, bulk material delivery, and drainage solutions. We serve Baltimore, Chevy Chase, Montgomery County, Clarksville, Howard County, Ellicott City, Kingsville, Bowie, Pasadena, Towson, and many other areas throughout Maryland.
You can contact Lehnhoff’s Landscaping for all of your Baltimore landscaping needs by calling 443.921.5789 today! Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, too.