Your outdoor living space is your personal paradise. It’s the place where you can relax by yourself, or make memories with family and friends. When planning out your perfect setting for barbecues and summer nights outdoors in Lexington and Winchester, MA, it’s important to choose outdoor lighting that will accentuate the best features of your landscape. The right outdoor lighting strategy will create a landscape that stands out, looks beautiful, and impresses your guests.
Creative Outdoor Lighting
Outdoor lighting is essential to keep your outdoor spaces safe at night, but with the right techniques, it can also become a key feature of your overall landscape design. There are a wide variety of options for different lighting types and styles, and knowing a few will help you envision your ideal night time landscape, and make it so you can collaborate with your landscapers to turn your dreams into a reality.
One of the best ways to impress your guests with outdoor lighting is to focus on highlighting key features of your outdoor living space. A few well-placed lights can create subtle, yet gorgeous, views that will elevate the look and feel of your landscape.
Moonlighting
Sometimes natural lighting needs a little push. Moonlighting uses artificial lights to create the look of a full moon illuminating your outdoor space every night. This can work best in tall trees, if a bluish light were to be placed at the top. The light filters through the leaves and branches, creating the effect of dappled moonlight and dancing shadows in the space below.
With the light hidden in the tree’s upper branches, moonlighting creates a subtle, yet artistic effect that will draw your guests’ eyes. It turns a simple tree into a key feature, creating a dramatic atmosphere and adding dimension to your landscape.
Water Feature Lighting
From ponds to waterfalls, water features often become focal points of a daytime landscape, but without proper lighting they can become hidden at night. Lights placed around a pond or other water feature can be essential for both safety and style purposes. The light will play off the water, highlighting the soft ripples on the surface, and bringing this area of your landscape to life. When appropriate, underwater lighting can also create unique effects that emphasize the texture and tranquil atmosphere of water features at night.
Silhouetting
Attention to detail is often what makes a landscape particularly impressive. Silhouetting creates an opportunity to highlight smaller features like individual plants. With the proper lighting, these features can turn into key details that add texture to your nighttime landscape.
Silhouetting lights could be placed in front of a plant, to create a stark shadow on the wall behind it. The play of light and shadow accentuates the natural geometry of the plants, adding texture and an air of intrigue to your outdoor space.
Grazing
This technique focuses on some of the often underappreciated features of an outdoor space, like walls or other stone or stone-like surfaces. Adding specialized lighting to these features helps to incorporate them into the nighttime landscape design. Grazing lights can be placed close to the surface, and pointed either up or down.
Grazing can create the effect of dancing shadows, highlighting the texture of the hardscape feature. This helps to define the outdoor space, by highlighting the combination of natural and manmade features that make up the landscape. It helps to establish a smooth transition from indoor to outdoor living, contributing to an atmosphere that will make your guests feel at home, as well as impressed, by your space.