PROFESSIONAL LANDSCAPE DESIGN: Light the Way

A landscaped yard can do wonders for a home, and a good lighting design can do wonders for a landscape. For those designers looking to extend the enjoyment of their clients’ outdoor areas, landscape lighting design can do just that and more.
 
“If you’re going to spend $50,000 on landscaping, why do you want to turn it off at 6 p.m.?” asks Eric Borden, vice president of product management and market research at Sea Gull Lighting, Riverside, N.J. Landscape lighting “really allows you to accentuate your landscape design. There’s nothing more attractive than driving down the street and seeing a well-illuminated home.”
 
In addition to increasing nighttime usability of a landscape, lighting also enhances safety, adds Steve Parrott, media and marketing director of CAST Lighting, Hawthorne, N.J.
 
In fact, once people hear the benefits of landscape lighting, it’s normally not a hard sell. And these days, with people “cocooning” and improving the home they’re in, landscape lighting is one route homeowners can take, says Randall Whitehead, architectural lighting designer at Randall Whitehead Lighting Solutions, San Francisco.
 
“Instead of moving to a bigger house, which is what our parents did, I think people are doing more cocooning, staying in the house they’re in and enhancing it,” Whitehead explains. “They’re using equity in the house to upgrade the interior, and naturally moving to the exterior. If they have a lot of untapped property outside, they could put some time and money into it and really create an environment out there.”

REASONS TO LIGHT. To some, adding a light here or there throughout the yard doesn’t seem like it would have much of an effect, but landscape lighting can serve many functions.
 
As far as security goes, Parrott points out that “intruders are less likely to target a well-lit landscape.” Lighting also can help put homeowners’ minds at ease, whether they’re in the home, working late or on vacation. “If you have a lighting control, you can set it to where you can leave and feel secure that certain lights will come on at certain times,” says Carrie Edwards, designer at Illuminations Lighting Design in Houston.
 
But while lighting for security reasons is a good starting point, designers should make sure their clients realize the other benefits to a landscape lighting design.
 
“Security lighting and landscape lighting are two different things,” Whitehead explains, adding that discussing security lighting is a “good way to get your foot in the door without offending the client. Usually we’ll come in and have a two-headed fixture over a garage door. We’ll say, ‘Oh, you put in security lighting … now let’s talk about landscape lighting.’ We want them to realize there’s a difference between lighting for protection purposes and lighting that’s more for ambiance.”
 
With security lighting, “pathways, stairs and other areas of passage are lit sufficiently for safe movement throughout the property,” Parrott says. But in addition to that, lighting can be used to enhance textures of the home and landscape.
 
“It’s how you’re drawing interest in and whether the client wants to draw your eye to the fountain first,” Edwards says as she explains how using different angles and lighting techniques can accentuate various areas of the landscape. “Lighting can guide you from one point to the next. Depending on how bright or dim something is or the particular color that it is, these elements can set a very flat picture apart from a very interesting and diverse environment.”
 
Having lighting outdoors also helps avoid what Whitehead calls the “black mirror effect,” which occurs when homeowners stand inside at night and look through a window. If no outdoor lighting exists it’s like looking at your own reflection in a black mirror, Whitehead explains.  Installing a variety of lighting techniques can make a world of difference.

DESIGN TECHNIQUES. Anyone can install landscape lighting. It’s more of a question of whether he can do it well and if the end result enhances the landscape.
 
“Anyone can do just a general lighting,” Edwards says. “Everybody wants to have something to set them apart, and that’s what designers do. When clients come to us, we take that general idea and enhance it and refine what they want and give them a little more.”
 
Dave Zorich and his wife, Kim, realized the benefits of working with a professional when they were installing landscape lighting at their Asheville, N.C. home. The couple realized they didn’t know how to properly sequence lighting to enhance the right areas the right way, Dave Zorich says.
 
There are a variety of lighting techniques, some of the more common being uplighting, downlighting and silhouette lighting.  And, Borden says, “the best lighting design is a layered design, combining at least two lighting techniques.”
 
A combination of lighting works well to highlight different plants, areas of the home, sculptures or really anything in the yard that the client wants to draw attention to. With moonlighting, fixtures can be mounted in trees to allow light to come down as if from a full moon; uplighting can be used on the walls of a home to create texture or shadows.
 
“We’re combining these lighting techniques to create environments that are inviting and dramatic and usable,” Whitehead says. 
 
One of the challenges for designers is they sometimes have to reel in their ideas to fit within their clients’ budgets.
 
“As a designer, when you first go look at the landscape and look at the house, your first instinct may be that you can do so many things,” Edwards explains, adding that some clients have fairly strict budget restrictions. “But you learn to kind of compromise and find a different way to do it than the actual conventional way.”
 
Whitehead says he often has clients who come to him and say, “Come in and make my landscape look good.” When that happens, Whitehead gives a five-minute talk that he calls “the language of light,” during which he goes over various techniques and how they can enhance the landscape. “Once they get it, they have these terms to work with,” Whitehead says. “I say,  ‘We’re going to accent this,’ then they get it.”
 
While customers might learn the lingo, there’s still the matter of actually implementing the techniques.
 
“Clients are looking at the lighting, they don’t want to see the fixtures and how you’re doing it, they just want to turn it on and look,” Edwards says. “It’s not just setting the light in the ground. If the fixture is in a tree, you have to focus that light on a particular object, it’s not just ‘Here, we’ll put this up there and it’s going to shine.’ There’s more of a technique of where it will shine, how far it will shine, can you diffuse the lens, is there a way to spread the beam, a way to soften the beam … the challenge for the designer is how do you make all of these elements relate with each other?”

FORWARD THINKING. When designers are dealing with a client who is building a home, they usually recommend that clients think ahead in terms of what they might want from their landscaping down the road.
 
“Landscape lighting is something people look at when they drive down the block, they see a job and they go, ‘Wow, why didn’t we think of that?’ It’s usually an afterthought,” Borden says. “It should be considered when the landscape design is being done. You can prepare for it.”
 
Zorich says he and his wife knew they didn’t want their lighting to “look like it was thought about and installed after the fact.” The couple was convinced by their landscape designer that thinking ahead
about lighting was the right thing to do, and Zorich is happy with the result. “We had a general idea, a vision of where we wanted to go, and we kind of turned it over to him to take care of it,” Zorich says.
“To me, I’m into hiring professionals to do what they do best.”
 
While it’s easiest to plan for landscape lighting with new construction, Whitehead says, “75 percent of the work we do is on existing gardens.” In warmer climates, work can be done year-round, but Parrott says the majority of people are inspired to enhance their landscape with lighting in the spring.
 
When it comes to selling landscape lighting to a client, Parrott says, “brochures are never sufficient to give a homeowner a sense of what landscape lighting can do for their home.” Ideally, it’s best to show them in person various lighting designs so they can get an idea of what they can do with their own yard. Borden says most manufacturers of landscape lighting products will have a demonstration kit available for purchase, which allows designers to do a mock-up in a client’s yard.
 
“We’ll plug in a variety of fixtures, we’ll uplight some plants, tape some up in the trees to throw light down. The client gets immediate gratification,” Whitehead explains. “I don’t think we’ve ever not gotten the contract if we go in and do a mock-up.”

STICKER SHOCK. There’s no set pricing standard for landscape lighting, and the cost really depends on the size of the landscape and how much a client wants to do.
 
Parrott estimates that most professional landscape lighting designers/installers start at about $2,500 for about 12 fixtures. While bigger residential projects may have as many as 200 fixtures for a cost of about $45,000, he says smaller jobs tend not to be very cost-effective for designers.
 
With outside lighting, “you can spend a small amount of money and make a huge difference,” Whitehead says. He estimates that a good landscape accent light is about $125, and it’d probably be about $125 for the electrician’s time, so he says about $250 per fixture and installation is probably a good benchmark.
 
One trend in landscape lighting is the usage of energy-efficient products.  More fluorescent and LED lights are being used outdoors. The draw is their longevity. For example, while an incandescent bulb might last 750 hours, an LED equivalent to that bulb might last 50,000 hours. However, these bulbs tend to be more costly.
 
People “basically will be leaving light bulbs to their children in their will using LED  lights,” Whitehead says. “We can thank Al Gore for making us a little more aware of our contribution to greenhouse gases – LED bulbs are very good for the environment.”
 
While there are a number of benefits to using energy-efficient bulbs, some homeowners just don’t like the look of them. Zorich says he doesn’t think LED lights “look real natural outside,” so he and his wife chose to not use them in their design.
 
Designers take note: The Zorichs are pleased their landscape designer urged them to think ahead about incorporating  lighting into their landscape.  “You save a lot of money, heartache and effort if you think about what you want on a grander scale and think about how you want to do it from the very beginning,” Zorich says. “Consumers don’t often think about the big picture enough.”
 
Professionals also should remember to upsell the fact that lighting may increase the home values, Edwards says. “Some will do a little at a time, but once they realize how much lighting sets their home apart from the average Joe, then they tend to lose that sticker shock and realize it’s definitely something worth doing.”