For many homeowners or business owners, giving their residential or commercial property a beautiful curb appeal is a point of pride. You want your property to impress your guests whether they see it during the day or at night. Of course, the daylight naturally shows off all your beautiful landscaping efforts. But, how do you ensure your curb appeal doesn’t suffer at night? Landscape lighting is the perfect solution for creating a warm nighttime look, and our landscape design professionals at Cortada Landscape Design have a few tips and ideas to help anyone maximize his or her outdoor lighting.
Combine Design with Safety and Utility
Landscape lighting is so important because, on top of providing an aesthetic appeal, it also makes your outdoor space safer and more usable. With an effective and expertly created lighting design, you can have both. For instance, homeowners can use path lighting to mark the route to the door so guests find their way. This same principle applies to lighting a back-patio area or the path to a gazebo. Commercial properties, similarly, want to provide lighting that is both inviting and safe, creating a well-lit parking area where their customers can feel comfortable and protected.
Make the Lighting Complement Your Look
Every home or business has its own aesthetic style, whether it’s a homey rustic look, a more modern style with clean lines, or an ornate and indulgent elegance. Whatever personal style you’ve designed your outdoor space in, you want your lighting to match. Our skilled and creative designers at Cortada Landscape Design are style experts who can build a landscaping and lighting design that appeals to your specific tastes and complements your property’s existing look.
Use Energy-Efficient Light Sources
While your main objectives for lighting your landscape may be aesthetics and usability, you also want it to be practical for your wallet and the environment. The best way to do this is to use energy-efficient lighting sources. At Cortada Landscape Design, we focus primarily on LED lights. With a lifespan of up to 40,000 to 50,000 hours (compared with around 2,000 hours for a typical halogen bulb), LEDs use a very small amount of energy to operate. This means they have less of an impact on your energy bill, are easier on the environment, and last longer.
Position Lighting Near Landscaping Accents
While lighting can create a warmer and more welcoming appearance for your residential or commercial property, it’s also a great way to highlight your landscaping’s best features. For instance, up-lighting can be used to accent some of your beautiful trees, and down-lighting can show off some lush flowers or rows of shrubs. Landscape lighting can also be used to accent non-organic features, such as fountains, retaining walls, etc. By positioning your lighting to show off your favorite accents, you can make the most of your landscaping by keeping it visible 24/7.
Keep it Low-Maintenance
Everyone wants their landscape lighting to be visually appealing. But, you also want it to be easy on your schedule. In addition to using energy-efficient LED lights that don’t need to be replaced as often, we can also help you make your landscape lighting easy to manage. Many homeowners and business owners choose to have their outdoor lighting on a timer so they don’t need to remember to turn it on and off each day.
Try Playing with Different Levels
When we’re designing a landscape, our creative and experienced professionals at Cortada Landscape Design know the benefit of having a variety of tall, short, and medium-height plants and features. This adds dimension to your landscaping. The same principle applies to outdoor lighting. By pairing low path lighting with down-lit shrubs, up-lit trees, and, perhaps, under-window lighting on the outside of your home or business, you can create a more regal and high-end look.
Avoid Light Pollution
As much as you want to illuminate your beautiful landscaping, there are also specific angles and problems you want to avoid. For instance, make sure none of your lights is flooding your neighbors’ homes or businesses. Keep your lighting away from angles that may hit your guests directly in the eyes as they’re coming up your path, pulling into your driveway, or approaching your doorstep. You also want to avoid overdoing your landscape lighting so it washes out the night sky. After all, the appeal of well-placed lighting is it stands out from the surrounding darkness, and you want to stay minimal enough to keep this look.
Design Your Landscaping and Lighting Together
Many homeowners and business owners do their outdoor design in stages – they start with the landscaping and then later realize they want the lighting to enhance their nighttime curb appeal. However, if you’re in the earlier stages of designing your outdoor space, it’s ideal to have your full landscape (including lighting) created with one comprehensive design. While our designers are highly experienced in working with an existing landscape to create the perfect lighting to complement it, having your outdoor space designed all at once can truly allow us to maximize its potential.
Leave it to the Professionals
As these many tips clearly show, creating the perfect lighting for your landscape is a delicate balance that requires an experienced aesthetic eye, careful calculations, and precise electrical planning. If you want to truly allow your outdoor lighting to accentuate your landscape’s best features, your best bet is to bring in professionals like our team at Cortada Landscape Design. Opting for a one-time design rather than a long DIY trial-and-error process can give you a more high-end result and save you countless hours of your valuable time.
Landscape and outdoor lighting design is a more involved and precise process than most people initially realize. At Cortada Landscape Design, we work with clients every day who started trying to design their outdoor space themselves but ultimately decided to hire our professional team so they could achieve a more comprehensive and high-end solution. To find out how we can maximize the curb appeal of your property, call us for a consultation.