One of the most transformative changes you can make to your Hinsdale, IL landscape is to add targeted outdoor lighting. Having illumination for your outdoor spaces can let you and your guests go from day to night seamlessly. These lighting tips can ensure your favorite spaces are illuminated after the sun sets.
Outdoor Lighting Details
Landscape lights are surprisingly energy-efficient and won’t cause a spike in your electricity bill. These low-voltage lights are durable and can last for years to illuminate areas of your landscape. They can produce ethereal moonlight in your front yard and brighter lighting to illuminate a walkway for better visibility. The most pleasing landscape lighting plan is as much artistry as illumination.
Types of Outdoor Lighting
While most landscape lighting offers multiple color options including a range of white tones, there are certain fixtures that can be better in one space than another.
Bullet Lights: Bullet lights emit a narrow beam that shines directly on an object or surface. They can be perfect to illuminate garden features like statues, tree trunks, and house features like stone columns.
Wash Lights: Wash lights produce a diffused illumination that looks great on the front of the house, wood fences, brick walls, and garden enclosures.
Garden Lights: Garden lights emit light that illuminates a circle around the ground where the light is placed. They look amazing in landscape beds and along walkways to shine on the areas below the light fixtures.
Flood Lights: Flood lights also shine directly onto a feature or surface but they emit a broader beam than bullet lights. Placing floodlights at the base of trees and at the foundation of the house can shine light onto the surface to highlight textural and surface details.
Well Lights: Well lights are recessed into the ground to shine directly upward onto the shrubbery, stone and retaining walls, and stone pillars.
Areas of the Landscape to Enhance
While the goal of outdoor lighting is to illuminate the areas that you want to see after dark, there are some standard lighting ideas that can work well in any landscape design.
Garden Lights
A garden area such as your prized rose garden or an English-style garden can be a great choice for illumination. Adding lighting to the fence that encloses the garden can produce shadows and textures while direct illumination on the gate can draw attention to the garden entry. Within the garden, garden lights can illuminate the roses and their unique colors and add lighting to the garden path so you can see to move around.
Patio Lights
Patios are another area that can benefit from illumination so you and your guests don’t have to go indoors when the property gets dark. There, you will want some softer lights to set the mood and brighter lighting options especially when you have an outdoor kitchen or fire pit where guests like to mill around.
Walkway Lights
Walkways can look inviting with pathway lighting that shines on the surface and the adjoining landscape plantings to draw the eyes to the colorful blooms that spill over onto the paver walkway surface.
Front Entry Lights
Making your home visible from the main street so guests can locate it easily is ideal but you also want your house to look gorgeous after dark so lighting here is a must-have.
Related: Outdoor Lighting for Every Occasion: Tips and Tricks for Each Season in Naperville & Plainfield, IL
About the Author
Since 1984, Figgins Trees & Turf has offered an array of design and build and landscape maintenance services with a personal touch. Our versatility and wide range of specializations—from general maintenance to an extensive portfolio of design and build installations—set us apart.