When considering outdoor lighting for your outdoor living space, it’s essential to be aware of three things. First, lighting is meant to be enjoyed in the evening. Second, the outdoor lighting design needs to be tailored to your specific tastes and outdoor area elements.
The third and final point is that the lighting needs to find a balance between being aesthetically pleasing and serving the purpose of providing a safe environment.
So, to help you create a beautiful and safe outdoor space, here are some ways in which lighting can enhance your outdoor living space elements.
The Importance Of Lighting And How It Can Enhance A Space
Good outdoor lighting can emphasize the landscape of your garden as well as increase security. By using strategically placed lights, you can highlight paths and walkways so that you can easily move around your garden in the dark.
When starting to transform your outdoor living space through lighting, try walking around your garden at night with a flashlight. This will help you identify areas that are perhaps too dark and certain areas that need to be lit, such as walkways.
Besides being safer, having ambiance lighting can give your outdoor living space a warm and welcoming feeling – making it the perfect place to relax.
When walking through your garden, it’s also important to ask yourself what your aim is in lighting your garden. Do you want it to be a reflection of your indoor living space? Or are you aiming to create an entirely new world through lighting?
Either way, here are some ways that lighting can enhance your outdoor elements.
Accent Features
Accent lighting is purely aesthetic and carries very little security and safety. It makes your garden seem more dynamic by highlighting a specific feature. This can be a landscape, architectural, or even artistic feature in your garden.
To accent a feature, you will generally use spotlights or floodlights to light it up so that it’s clearly visible even when it’s dark.
By doing this, you automatically draw your guests’ eyes to that feature and can therefore enhance the overall landscape and atmosphere of your garden.
Light Up Your Walkways, Patios, and Driveways
This is a more security-driven method of lighting up your outdoor living space. But, with the use of modern lights and lighting designs, you can get creative and make it look good as well.
The term used for this specific form of lighting is called task lighting (as it performs a task such as lighting a walkway, patio, or driveway). You ensure that your guests can see where to walk at night, while still creating a neat and inviting environment by focusing on the placement of these lights.
As a driveway may also be lit by the lights of cars, low-voltage lights are very popular for this. They are easy to install and use less energy than other systems.
When lighting steps, you can also play around with the placement. Consider whether you want lights placed along the sides of steps or hide them under the nose of the steps so that people can easily see where each step lies. The latter can truly emphasize the steps as a feature and create a stunning, layered visual effect.
The same goes for the lighting on your decks or patios. Although it’s still task lighting, it can also enhance the atmosphere of your patio area. For example, you can use wall lighting to create sufficient lighting around seating areas or the grill area but enhance your patio further with some fairy lights to create an inviting and magical space.
Set The Mood In Your Pergola
When setting the mood for your pergola, you would most likely use overall lighting elements with some aspects of accent lighting.
You can use your lighting choices here to highlight the interesting architecture or design of the pergola. By using specific bulbs, such as incandescent bulbs, you can also establish the right atmosphere. Although incandescent bulbs have a short life, they emit a pleasing, glowing light.
Highlight Walls
An interesting feature to highlight in your garden may be a wall. Whether you have a beautiful, textured wall that you want to accent or would like to show off your neat retaining walls, lighting is the perfect way to do so.
By installing hidden lights in the ledges of your retaining walls, you can create an interesting visual effect that can brighten up your whole garden. You can also add lighting to highlight the trees or shrubbery growing up from behind your walls to enhance the natural elements in your outdoor area.
Brighten Up Your Outdoor Living Space Elements
Outdoor lighting, while enhancing security, can change the entire ambiance of your outdoor living space. By using it strategically, you can add a welcoming and luxurious atmosphere to your garden. So, if you are looking to upgrade your home, lighting is an excellent place to start.