To create a truly beautiful and fully useful outdoor living space, landscape lighting is essential. Creative lighting options can enhance your landscape rather than detract from it. Here are five ways that landscape lighting can be customized to suit your needs in the Sterling Heights and Bloomfield Township, MI, areas.
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Illuminating the landscape with subtle, classy lighting will avoid a blinding effect that can drive guests away. When they are not installed carefully, floodlights can cast harsh, dangerous shadows that cut apart the pleasing ambience that you want your landscape to exude. By opting for a combination of outdoor lighting techniques, you can ensure the best ambience, security, and practicality that you need for your outdoor living spaces.
Lights in Walls
Retaining walls already serve many useful purposes, from minimizing erosion and clearly defining spaces to creating focal points. You can also have landscape light fixtures added to any vertical structure by hiding them under the capstone. You won’t notice these fixtures during the day, and at night, they draw the eye to the textures of the wall, wonderfully illuminating the stone and gracefully bouncing light onto other surfaces. This lighting style succeeds in creating depth of perception at night, enhancing safety and highlighting the wall’s texture.
Submersible Lighting
This type of lighting enhances any water feature and adds an incredible level of drama to the night-time experience. When ripples occur on the surface of the water, the lights below accentuate those fascinating moving details, giving you a visual delight from your vantage point on the pool deck or patio. Lights can be placed behind a waterfall that heighten its visual quality and provide ambient light. Aimed correctly, lights can also shine toward laminar jets or water falling from a fountain. Any of these lighting techniques increase drama and expression, and you can play with different colored bulbs to completely change the atmosphere on a whim.
Spotlighting
While flood lights tend to blanket an area in bright light, spotlights can be calibrated to amplify one feature. When a spotlight is placed beneath a tree and pointed up the side, it can highlight the texture of the bark while light waves bounce in different directions. If placed a few feet away from a retaining wall, it lets the area’s source of light be the beautiful wall itself, especially if a light-colored stone is used. If your home has an interesting feature such as a stone chimney, use the spotlights to show off your home’s exterior beauty.
Moonlighting
By mimicking the soft glow of the moon, your landscape lighting can create a soothing, romantic effect in your outdoor living space. This technique uses white and bluish lights for a gorgeous, natural full moon feel. Placing the lights in trees within the branches high in the canopy will dapple the ground with this soft, quiet light without dampening textures. The light will be subtle enough to feel like natural moonlight but bright enough to ensure safety.
Silhouetting
Adding to the technique of spotlighting, use this technique to heighten visual drama. By shining a light at an angle against a uniform surface like a wall, a small object could be placed in front, such as a metal statue to create gorgeous shadow art. Many plants are incredible structures themselves and can create larger-than-life shadows within your outdoor living space.
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