Articles and whitepapers

Outdoor Lighting (3/5/2004)

By David Caddick

In a country where it is often dark when you leave and return home, artificial lighting plays an important, yet often taken for granted, part of our every day lives. With a more cosmopolitan Britain driven by 'lifestyle' and 'design' home and garden television programmes, it is only natural that the room outside has become the latest useable living space to benefit from such a makeover. So as night follows day, the use of artificial lighting in our, often now heated, gardens, roof terraces or backyards, enhancing features and creating a desirable new space has become fashionable.

With well-designed lighting, this patio now becomes an attractive and usable space at night

On a practical level, a well-designed and lit garden adds to both the attractiveness of a house and its resale value. Additionally, outdoor lighting allows the homeowner to feel the full benefit of their garden or external living area throughout the year. The lighting of interesting architectural details, on buildings, water features and flora within the garden, enhances the outdoor space, but can often also be appreciated from within by providing an attractive focal feature to look out onto.

Planning

Whilst there is an increasing range of external lighting products now available in every DIY store and garden centre up and down the country, this merely scratches the surface of the possibilities that are available through professional lighting and design companies. Working in partnership with the home owner or architect and landscape designer, lighting design professionals will develop bespoke schemes that utilise the individual characteristics of the garden and its surroundings to create a unique 'look' and 'feel' for the owner.

Planning is key to successful installation of any outdoor lighting project, where the capital cost of the light fittings is often far exceeded by the ground works required to install the cabling and fittings in an unobtrusive way. Although a retro-fit outdoor lighting project can be sympathetically integrated into an existing garden or outdoor space, an integrated approach between lighting and landscape designers will invariably provide a more flexible and discreet solution.

Design tricks

There are any number tricks to lighting a garden, and with good design, any garden or exterior space can be visually stimulating and exude an aesthetically pleasing ambience. The careful choice of the correct fixtures is key to ensuring that the right effect is created. Shrouded spotlighting of special objects or specimen shrubs provides illumination without glare, and overlapping light patterns create both a more uniform lighting effect whilst softening the shadows. Spread lighting is best used in illuminating ground cover and low shrubs as the circular patterns of light they produce, when carefully shielded, will provide glare-free landscape lighting.

Ground wash effect

Up lighters, often the backbone to outdoor lighting, are integral in providing backlighting as well as providing specific lighting of features, again without glare, and can be also used to introduce colour within the space to coordinate with the seasons. Special effects such as moonlighting and silhouetting can be generated to create moods by using down lighters and up lighters in tandem.

Moonlighting Effect

Light filtering through the trees, mirroring on a pond or shadowing special features are common themes. Low-voltage LED lights offer a highly manageable clear white light source that underpin many outdoor designs - their flexibility in switching and dimming allowing designers to create different moods and effects.

Installation

Careful installation of outdoor lighting products is imperative to both the durability and safety of the design. Higher-level fixtures mounted to patio canopies, gazebos, facades, eaves or even trees allow for efficient, hidden and safe lighting. Recessed, in-ground lights, provide glare-free illumination. Fittings with copper and brass construction will in time take on a patina, blending perfectly into the landscape, but in all cases the maturing of the plants and shrubs must be taken into consideration to prevent the design becoming obscured in time. The complexity of the control systems required to manage these fixtures is limited only by time, money and experience, but if planned in advance, an outdoor lighting system can be integrated practically within the home, allowing for individual lighting and timing of the garden and its features.

Outlook

As the outdoor living space becomes more mature, the lighting and garden industry will respond to the increased sophistication and choice demanded by the consumer. The complexity of the designs, fittings and effects sought will, in time, become little different to the demands we see for the lighting of bars, clubs and restaurants. It is an exciting and challenging prospect.

David Caddick is a Director of The Light Corporation, consultants providing custom-designed interior and exterior lighting solutions, in-house manufacture and a range of architectural standard lighting products, including the 'Off World Range' of exterior landscape lighting, made in England.

www.lightcorporation.com