Outdoor Lighting Ideas to Elevate Your Home's Exterior
It is easy to get distracted by all the improvements, such as landscaping and painting, when considering ways to elevate your home's curb appeal. Proper exterior lighting on your house is a sure way to make your home look and feel truly yours and to increase your home’s value— but only if it is done right.
If you are thinking of ways to renovate the outdoor landscape lighting design in a way that improves its appearance and boosts the property's value, you may have to do more than landscaping wiring and floodlight installation. In this guide, we will cover a few great home outdoor lighting ideas that help improve the security of your home with additional illumination to make it nicer, inviting, and homely.
Illuminate Your Home's Exterior to Attract, not Distract
The saying 'you only have one chance to make the first impression' couldn't be more accurate when it comes to installing outdoor light fixtures. How your house looks from the street at night can tell a stranger a lot about the people living inside. Here are a few ideas you should use as a rule of thumb when designing your home's exterior lighting.
Firstly, do not consider security lighting as a part of landscape lighting. Any lighting that glares people out is not welcoming at all. It is worse when motion sensors activate them or when you merely install floodlights under the eaves of the house. Which is not to say you don’t want to deter burglars, but that you can do so with a more appealing lighting design.
Consider layering outdoor lighting, just as you would with indoor lighting. Layering is a new trend that embeds elements of accent, ambiance, task lighting, and light decoration as a way of installing landscape lighting. Just as you would layer the lights in your bathroom, this design serves a purpose but they all blend to create welcoming and glowing illuminated outdoor spaces.
Focus on The Landscape
Landscape lighting can serve the purpose of illuminating the front and backyards for security, but their primary purpose is decorative. Rather than just search for 'landscape lighting installers near me' and go with their ideas of decorative lighting, take the time to identify the best features of your home's exterior that you want to highlight and let it guide your choice of outdoor lighting. For instance, if you have a garden with beautiful trees, your lighting should illuminate to highlight them at night. If the front of the house boasts a lovely front door, then lighting the path up to the entryway might draw the eye to the focal point of the home.
A great way to install landscape lighting is to use different colors for different areas or elements of your home. If you have a flower garden, you may want to consider multi-colored LED lights to highlight the different sections of the landscape. For the pathway snaking through the garden, you can use a string light installation for path lights that allows you to play with how you highlight the walkway with colors or motion sensors.
Your choice of exterior lighting colors and light types can go a long way to give your home a personality. Depending on where you live, and seasons, you may want to consider lighting options that you can also turn on during the day during special occasions such as outdoor holiday lighting.
Do Not Overlook The Roof
Roof lights are another great way to elevate your home's exterior in a way that makes a big difference. For instance, if you have a big house with an unconventional roof, you could line the rooftop with a string of lights that highlight its edges. If your home has a high roof, you may want to consider installing roof lights that shine the ground to complement security lighting to illuminate the yard.
Roof lights can also make your home stand out from your neighbors. For example, on the front porch, you can install exterior lights to complement the lighting theme that illuminates the front yard. This approach will also leave room for you to play with lighting options, such as using color-changing spot lights to adapt the house's theme to the season style or mood.
You may need to consult an experienced outdoor lighting contractor for advice on the best roof lights to use, especially when lighting on a budget. It is advisable that you go for down-lit lights that are energy-efficient and cause less light pollution. While you may want your home to stand out, it should not cost you more than necessary to keep the accent lights on.
General Tips to Achieve a Glowing Exterior Moonlight Effect
Outdoor lighting designers experiment a lot with various effects to achieve a warm and inviting glowing exterior effect, also called the Moonlight effect. This naturalistic look essentially illuminates the best features of the home's exterior more intensely than a full moon. Here are seven general tips you may want to consider before heading out to find an outdoor lighting installation near me.
1. Use both downlights and uplights to achieve a dramatic effect. Lights that shine both upwards and downwards can highlight the best features of the home's exterior when used in moderation.
2. There is no single best outdoor lighting you can use everywhere and still keep the landscape vibrant and welcoming. Vary the fixtures and lighting types, but be careful not to overdo it. Some of the lighting fixtures homeowners can use include flood lights, up and downlights, step lights, string lights, garden lights, and bollard lights.
3. Stick to creating a warm light effect. Sure, you can use lights to create a rainbow effect, but this does not mean you should. A uniform warm and glowing effect showcases the house and its landscape better than any other effect. Too many colors can also create a distracting light show that you do not want.
4. Orchestrate the lighting outside the house to create focus and save energy. For instance, when wiring low voltage landscape lights, you can set timers or sensor lights to bring displays to life at sunset and turn them off at sunrise.
5. Unless advised by a decorator, it is best to replace outdoor light fixtures you already have with themed fixtures such as coastal style exterior lighting. Trying to mix and match to save costs may hurt the appearance and perceived value of your home.
Final Thoughts
Whether you are looking to upgrade your home's exterior or want a complete renovation to personalize its landscape, you have to put effort into it to nail it the first time. Your home does not merely need to be brightly illuminated with multi-colored lights to stand out. You have to design an outdoor lighting system that complements its design, and combines beauty and function.
The first step to improving your home's exterior with lighting styles is to contact us today to get advice on how to elevate your home's exterior with the right outdoor lighting.
