Illuminate Your Landscaping With These Outdoor Lighting Ideas in Peterborough and Milford, NH
One of the key factors in purchasing your home is envisioning the potential of its outdoor living area. Every homeowner wants to make a backyard that allows friends and family to gather and make wonderful memories. To get the most out of your outdoor lifestyle, you’ll need to encourage a welcoming and attractive nighttime experience with thoughtfully designed landscape lighting. Make sure to work with landscaping professionals to illuminate your landscaping with these outdoor lighting ideas in Peterborough and Milford, NH.
Related: HOW OUTDOOR LIGHTING CAN ENHANCE YOUR PETERBOROUGH, NH LANDSCAPING
Layering Techniques
Every successful outdoor lighting design scheme will use a series of lighting techniques that each have a specific focus. This will create a layered effect, increasing depth perception and encouraging a safer environment in your outdoor living area.
If your home currently relies on bright overhead lights to cover an entire landscape, you already know this is an inefficient approach that does a poor job of illuminating the important parts of the landscape: there are simply too many harsh shadows as well as glare in the eyes of anyone coming toward the home.
Instead of one or a few bright overhead lights, choose a greater number of more subtle light fixtures. This way, light won’t shine in anyone’s eyes, the important walking areas will be well-lit, while the rest of the landscape around the home will have interest and dimension, rather than a strong transition between well-lit and pitch-black.
Illuminate Ground Surfaces
The primary focus of your lighting design should be to create a safe environment. The ground surfaces of your outdoor living space should be clearly and intelligently illuminated with targeted light fixtures. The best type of light fixtures for this task will be some hard-wired walkway lights. Place these lights around the entire perimeter of your patio, as well as on one or both sides of the walkways throughout your landscape. These lights near the ground will focus their energy on the ground with no shadows that could obscure obstacles.
Hard-wired lights are preferred for walkway and patio safety; as wonderful as solar-powered lights are, in certain weather conditions they won’t be effective, especially during the winter. Deep snow and persistent cloud cover can block the tiny solar panels from retrieving any energy and the lights will get dimmer each day until they go dark. Hard-wired lights will fare much better in all types of weather.
To prevent a “runway” look, add some subtle lighting at a few places off to the side: your landscaping, any exposed rock, retaining walls, and trees make wonderful subjects for lighting.
Less is more when it comes to landscape lighting. Start by illuminating your walking spaces, and then add a light here and there, one at a time, to prevent an overly bright landscape that loses the magic of the night. For example, a single spotlight aimed at a rock outcrop will highlight the textures of the rock and the light will bounce off the rock to add ambient light. Choose the objects carefully: some will absorb light more than others. Illuminating a shrub, for example, will offer more subtle light than illuminating a wall or a rock.
If your outdoor living space contains a fire feature, you know it offers a fair amount of light; but like the flood light, it is a localized source of light that can cause harsh shadows, especially when walking away from the flames. Be sure to use ambient lighting techniques on the patio so that the space is well-lit whether the fire is roaring or not.
Related: ASK YOUR LANDSCAPER ABOUT THESE 5 OUTDOOR LIVING TRENDS IN BEDFORD AND MILFORD, NH
