How You Can Enjoy Your Outdoor Space After the Sun Goes Down

This time of year, we find ourselves wanting to spend most of our free time outside. One way to extend our hours in the outdoors is by adding landscape lighting to your outdoor living space. There are obvious advantages to having lighting in your landscape, and numerous varieties of lighting options to choose from. The possibilities are endless, especially when planning the design and functions of your landscape lighting.

Benefits
The obvious advantage of landscape lighting is making your space more visible in the dark, but there are many less obvious benefits. Adding light to your outdoor living space increases the likelihood that you and your loved ones can enjoy the outdoors well into the night. Light also adds to the appearance of your outdoor living space. Safety is another consideration, as light makes it easier to navigate pathways and walkways after dark. Landscape lighting can also be used for security as a well-lit exterior makes it harder to find hiding spots and easy entrance points. 

Types of Landscape Lighting
When adding lighting to your outdoor living space, it’s important to consider layout and lighting strategy. When it comes to layout, think about how the lighting looks from indoors as well as outdoors. Assess whether you want to highlight focal points with light such as trees or gardens. A sense of depth can be achieved by lighting the house, pathways, and patios. Choose between ambient or spotlighting, the difference being ambient lighting provides a soft glow over an entire space rather than drawing strong attention to one area with spotlighting. 

Uplighting & Cross Lighting
Uplighting is all about the drama of bold shadows and strong effects. By aiming the lights upwards into a tree or onto an architectural feature, you can emphasize the contrast of dark shadows with bright light. Cross lighting is when you eliminate shadows by lighting a focal point from both sides. A great fixture for uplighting and cross lighting is the BL200bt, a Bluetooth-enabled fixture. Not only does it perform excellently as an uplight, but it also has the ability to change colors so you can bring any kind of mood you’d like to your outdoor living space.

Another widely used type of lighting is path lighting. When incorporated with the other lighting strategies like uplighting and downlighting, path lights can help to fill in dark areas along walkways in and around your outdoor living space. These fixtures come in a number of sizes and styles to fit both the functional and aesthetic needs of your project.  Well-placed path lights can round out a lighting design making the connecting areas of your landscape both beautiful and secure.

Make It Your Own
These strategies will help you figure out what kind of lighting is right for you and your outdoor living space. Lighting up a landscape increases its curb appeal, safety, and security. It allows you to more fully and freely enjoy your outdoor living space. At Lurvey Home & Garden, we provide a wide range of options for landscape lighting as well as experts that can help you bring your vision to light.