Lighting your outdoor space comes with multiple perks. It highlights your property’s unique features and generates an alluring ambiance while illuminating pathways. Outdoor lighting elevates your home’s natural beauty and makes it safe for you and your loved ones to move around in the dark. It’s the best way to safeguard your property against intruders without compromising style.
Backyard lighting transforms your outdoor space. It enhances your home’s worth by boosting curb appeal and making the space more functional. Great lighting turns your yard into an oasis where you can relax or entertain guests. There are several backyard lighting options you can leverage based on your needs and requirements. Discussed below are six brilliant outdoor lighting ideas.
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Hardscape lighting
Hardscapes are the inanimate parts of your outdoor space, meaning they’re not alive. They include sitting walls, decks, pavers, steps, and retaining walls. Lighting your hardscapes is vital for your outdoor lighting plan. Without strategic lighting positioning, it’s easy to miss your hardscape features after the sun goes down. Hardscape lighting calls attention to its beauty, offers an extra security layer, and illuminates walking areas. Your landscape lighting choices depend on your unique home’s specifics and the combination of hardscapes present. Using hardscape lighting, you can:
- Offer safe passage via walkways linking your landscape areas
- Illuminate a favorite part of your property’s exterior, including a pergola or patio
- Direct attention to a unique water feature even after dark
- Create ambiance
You can opt for LED Hardscape Lighting because it requires less energy, which lowers your energy expenses and carbon footprint. It comes in many creative, colorful options that you can use to incorporate a unique touch to each hardscape with long-lasting bulbs.
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Wall lights
Outdoor wall lights are mounted on walls and are ideal for illuminating areas with a high slipping or falling probability, like pathways and stairways. These lights serve various purposes, including:
- Enhancing security in your home’s entrance and garden
- Beautifying the view of your yard, house, or an open area
- Helping you enjoy the yard at night
Considering the many outdoor wall lights available today, selecting the best can be difficult. However, taking note of the following factors can help:
- Function: For decorative reasons, softer wall lights, such as downlights, would be ideal for adding warmth to the yard. If you’re looking for secure outdoor lighting, passive infrared sensor lights or bulkhead lights would be perfect
- Power source: While electrical wall lights are a little costlier and need proper installation because they’re permanent fixtures, you’re assured of consistent illumination, as the lights can be kept on for as long as necessary. While solar wall lighting is cost-effective and eco-friendly, the batteries need sunlight to charge, which can restrict illumination time depending on the time of the year
- Location: Wall light positioning goes hand in hand with function. For instance, if you’re looking to deter intruders or make your property safer, floodlighting close to a path or at your home’s entrance can be a suitable solution
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Bollard lighting
Bollard lighting works well for your outdoor space as it offers a discrete but simple way to elevate natural areas and light walkways. They can also help enhance security and create your landscape design’s layout while accentuating architectural features. Bollard lights are of several types, including:
- Specialized cone reflector: Its light points down and out, giving excellent light coverage that doesn’t create glare. This lighting is ideal for ambient lighting
- Louver: The light points to the ground, making it perfect for natural areas and pathways
- Type V glass reflector: It’s the most intense lighting and gives 360-degree coverage. They’re a perfect solution if you intend to install a few bollards
- Standard cone reflector: It offers a 360-degree shine, illuminating everything around
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Garden spike lights
Outdoor spike lights are fixtures meant to be installed into the ground directly. Their flexibility allows you to move them around your landscape, meaning you can change their positioning whenever you want. To make the most out of your garden spike lights, consider:
- Highlighting your garden beds: To show off your plants and flowers, install these lights around your garden beds’ perimeter or position them strategically between specific plants to generate a warm glow
- Creating pathway lighting: When used to light walkways, pathways, and driveways, spike lights can guide guests around your yard or to the front door
- Providing ambient lighting: Placing these lights along a perimeter wall or around an outdoor entertainment area to create ambient lighting
- Accentuating shrubs and trees: Placing spike lights behind shrubs or installing them at tree bases and directing the beam upwards can help highlight your space’s natural beauty
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Outdoor pendant lighting
While pendant lights are popular for indoor spaces, they’re great for outdoor lighting as well. You suspend them from the ceiling, and you can use them to incorporate ambiance or create a focal point in your backyard. Pendant lights can also offer task lighting. You can use these lights in various ways, including:
- Hanging them over an outdoor dining table in your pergola or any other outdoor shelter in various lengths to give the space a unique, stylish look
- Suspending them near a concrete or brick wall to convert these dark areas into nighttime features
- Hanging pendant lights in trees to showcase them as natural features at night
Pendant lights come in various materials and designs. When selecting yours, consider the light’s purpose and location. For instance, to illuminate an outdoor dining and entertainment area, opt for pendant lights that offer ample task lighting.
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Spotlights
Spotlights are a perfect way to add drama to your outdoor space while enhancing its atmosphere by driving your attention to specific areas. You can add these lights to your garden to highlight the most attractive spots, bring an even light spread across open areas, or create exciting shadows.
Based on what you wish to achieve with spotlights, determine how bright you want them to be, the direction the light should go in, and consider the protection they require to serve you long enough. When installing spotlights, it’s essential to consider their positioning and light direction carefully, especially if there’s a possibility of creating glare. Opt for lights that you can adjust whenever you wish to change your space’s atmosphere.
Endnote
Lighting your garden is the perfect way to make the most out of your yard. Familiarize yourself with brilliant outdoor lighting ideas you can leverage to illuminate your backyard.
