A strategic outdoor lighting plan can extend the admiration of your beautiful landscape long into the night—and keep your outdoor areas safe as well. Even the most beautiful landscapes that catch the eye in the daytime sun can be completely obscured or even dangerous at night if proper lighting is not in place. Here are some of the reasons to revisit your outdoor lighting strategy in West Bloomfield Township and Troy, MI.
Related: Brighten Up Your Patio Pavers With These 6 Landscape Lighting Tips in West Bloomfield Township, MI
Illuminating the Ground
The place in your landscape where most accidents can happen is likely the ground. Unseen obstacles, whether they’re there by mistake or permanent parts of the landscape, can turn a safe landscape into a dangerous one. This is why a landscape lighting plan often puts some focus on walking surfaces to promote safety. There can be no safe nighttime landscape without walkway lighting.
There are many varieties of walkway lighting options that can help eliminate nighttime hazards in your landscape. They could be placed low to the ground and around the edge of all of your paver surfaces. Hardwired standalone lights or light fixtures built into masonry features make excellent walkway lights. You may want to avoid using overhead lights to illuminate your walkways since the distance between the light source and the surface can create significant shadows.
Illuminating Vertical Surfaces
Part of increasing security around your home involves illuminating the vertical surfaces that make up physical boundaries and features across the property. This involves the walls of the home as well as other structures, fences, retaining walls, large boulders, and more. The presence of these objects without some direct lighting can become shadowy places that impede the security of your home.
The spaces that need to be illuminated are any flat vertical area, such as a privacy wall or an outside wall in between windows. Use spotlights that are anchored at the ground to point upwards at an angle. This will not only make certain features more prominent, but it will help increase the visual texture and depth perception that create a warm and welcoming environment at night.
Illuminating to Create Ambience
Once safety and security have been achieved using various essential lighting techniques, the remaining landscape lighting could mainly focus on beauty and texture. While certain landscape features can be showcased using spotlighting, these may be few and far between. Creating ambience with lighting strategies can turn a space from dark and shadowy to vibrant and beautiful without calling too much attention to the lighting itself.
One exciting strategy to create ambience and help your landscape come to life is the practice of moonlighting. This lighting strategy uses the presence of one or a few white lights high up in trees and pointed downwards. The resulting light passes through the thick canopy of leaves and mimics the feeling of moonlight as it dances and interacts with the leaves in the slightest breezes.
Illuminating with Multiple Strategies
It may be recommended to illuminate your landscape using more than one outdoor lighting strategy. The simple reliance on one source of light could hinder the safety and security of a landscape, eliminating the feeling of safety and security. Multiple strategies can create a rich visual texture that enhances your landscape and home.
