Highlight the old to make it look new

During these hard economic times, people are reassessing their existing living spaces, as opposed to moving into larger homes like they did in years past. Landscape design and exterior lighting are ways of capturing usable space for homeowners without the higher cost of new construction or interior remodel work.

For those that have been in the industry for a long time, it is easy sometimes to forget what impact you can make on the quality of someone’s living situation. Sure, installing some up lights and some pathway lights would be an improvement over having no illumination at all, but in a way, you’re doing a disservice to yourself and your clients if you don’t open them up to all of the possibilities. Get them excited by showing them how you would be able to transform the spaces, both during the day and at night. Talk about how you would be able to expand their usable entertaining space by creating areas for alfresco dining and parties.
 

Inside out. Most landscaping professionals don’t set foot inside a potential client’s home when they are looking at a new project. This is really the best place to start your marketing. You want to see what your clients look out at from their windows and French doors. Thoughtful landscaping and well-placed lighting will create illuminated vignettes, which the homeowners can enjoy from inside their home. The reality is that there are only a certain number of months where people can go outside to enjoy their yard areas. During the winter and on days with inclement weather, people would still have the opportunity, with the right lighting, to take pleasure in their exterior spaces while looking from the inside out.

Proper lighting can expand a homeowner’s options for entertaining spaces, both indoors and out.

A really effective lighting design has two layers of illumination. One of these layers comprises all of the beautiful, subtle illumination that is created through accent lighting on sculpture and specimen plants, uplighting of trees, the washing of stone walls with light, well-placed decorative fixtures on the exterior façade of the house and any outbuildings. But the truth is that all of this disappears when the lighting inside the house is brighter than the lighting outside. What happens is that people end up seeing their own reflection instead of the view beyond, often referred to as the “black mirror” effect.

This is where the second layer of illumination comes into play. The best way to combat the black mirror effect is to install fixtures on the underside of the eave of the house, pointed out towards the backyard and side yards (or mounted on the façade of the house if there is no eave). These fixtures should be equal in brightness or brighter than the lighting inside so that the windows and glass doors become transparent again at night. This alternative second layer of lighting would only be turned on when people are inside looking out, not when they are out in the garden. When in the garden, you turn on the more subtle lighting that has been incorporated into the outside areas. These two layers would be on separate switches, allowing for the flexibility of year-round enjoyment of the exterior environment.

Painting with light. Landscape designers and contractors have an excellent grasp of landscape lighting basics, such as up lighting, fore lighting, back lighting, pathway lighting, etc. Now there is the opportunity to build upon those skills and really look at how “light layering” can create the look and feel of outdoor rooms. Whether you are working inside a house or outside, light can perform four functions, which are task, accent, decorative and ambient.

This is what you might call the language of light. They are easy terms to explain to your clients, and once they have a grasp of their meaning they will become more excited about the potential of their landscaping. Here is a more detailed explanation of what these terms mean:
 

Task lighting. This is lighting by which you do work. Included in this category would be well-positioned lighting at the barbecue to keep the lid from casting a shadow onto the cooking surface. Pathway lighting and step lights would also fall into this category, along with any lighting that helps people do activities safely.

Accent lighting. This would be the category with which you are most familiar. It is basically lighting that helps create depth and dimension in an exterior space. This includes the highlighting of plants and sculpture, illuminating water features, washing building façades and walls and highlighting natural features such as rock outcroppings.

Decorative lighting. Contractors tend to forget how important the addition of decorative lighting can be as part of an overall plan. Think of it as architectural jewelry. Wall-mounted lanterns draw people up to the front door and the back deck. Pole lights help indicate the beginning of a pathway that leads to the front door or marks the intersection of two converging pathways that are part of a larger landscape plan. A lantern hanging in the center of the gazebo creates a visual sparkle. People are naturally drawn to lighting. You can gently lead them with well-placed illumination.

Lighting can accentuate the color in plant beds around a home.

The key to decorative lighting is to keep the wattage very low. You want these fixtures to create the illusion that they are providing the illumination for an exterior area instead of visually overpowering the setting. A lantern with 100-watt or 75-watt bulb inside simply becomes a glare bomb; 25 watts to 40 watts is all you need to do the job. Also, selecting a lantern with a patterned or translucent glass helps hide the light source. If you select clear glass, even if it is a $600 fixture, all they will see is the 60 cent light bulb inside.

Ambient lighting. By definition this is indirect lighting. Inside a home we are talking about illumination that is bounced off the ceiling, used to help soften the shadows on people’s faces and fill the room with a soft glow. Because the outside area is open to the sky, this last layer of light can be a bit more of a challenge, but not impossible. If there is a pergola, then canvas can be draped or stretched across the horizontal members. Lighting mounted to the vertical supports can then uplight the underside of the canvas. There are also exterior light fixtures that are made to be affixed to the pole of an umbrella, projecting light onto the underside of the shade material. Throwing light onto the underside of deep overhanging eaves will also create some ambient light for the outside areas closer to the house.

A hint of color. As more installers are adopting LEDs as their go-to source, they have the opportunity to experiment a little with color. The truth is that plants look best when they are illuminated with a cooler color temperature (3200 to 4000° Kelvin). This helps to bring out the greens of the plant materials, and enhances the color saturation in the reds, yellows and blues of the flowering plants, bromeliads and succulents. When using halogen sources consider adding a filter that helps eliminate some of the amber hue. This is often referred to as a day light blue filter.

Pathway lights visually overpower the landscaping.

There are times when the warmer color temperatures do enhance what it is that you are illuminating, such as the trunk of a redwood tree, a brick path or sandstone wall. It is OK to mix color temperatures, depending on what it is you are illuminating. This will help add dimensionality to the overall look, as well as a hint of drama.

Even the addition of an occasional saturated color, such as casting a deep blue light on a white wall, will add some visual punch to the overall look of an exterior space. This can be done with the addition of colored filters, which can be added, exchanged or removed for different effects.

No pagoda lights. Pagoda lights do nothing to enhance the look of an exterior space. All they do is create little blobs of light that float 12 inches off the ground.

The most natural way to illuminate a walkway is to use shielded accent lights, mounted in the middle branches of mature trees. These cast light through the lower branches to create a pattern of dappled light and shadow onto the pathways. This is known as the moon lighting effect.

Of course, there are projects that have no mature trees, and some sort of guidance lighting is necessary. A first step in the right direction would be to use pathway lights with shielded light sources which throw the light downward without drawing attention to the light fixtures themselves.

A more interesting approach would be to use a decorative bollard with a hidden light source. The open metal filigrees project alluring patterns onto the ground, both during the warmer months, and even into the winter when snow is on the ground.

The bottom line. You now have the opportunity to be reinvigorated by all that is available in the realm of landscape design and lighting. Give yourself a creative edge. It will show your clients that you can provide something that is an intriguing step above what has become the norm, and the predictable.

The author is a designer, lecturer and owner of Randall Whitehead Lighting.