Let iTrust Home Service’s team install landscape lighting to keep your home and family more secure while accentuating it with light and beauty.
Landscape lighting can be beneficial to your home in so many ways. Below are benefits that iTrust Home Services landscape lighting services can provide you with:
Landscape Lighting Beautifies
Strategically placed landscape lights beautify your home by accentuating architectural features, landscaping and walkways. Firstly, adding outdoor lighting that shines on archways, rounded areas or unique sculptural elements of your home increases its curb appeal, giving it a warm, welcoming look.
Secondly, our yards are stunning when they are landscaped with shrubs, flowers and other ornamental plants. The yard is beautiful in the daylight but can’t be seen at at night unless illuminated. With perfectly placed landscape lighting, you can feature those plantings in many ways at night too, for a unique and captivating look.
Finally, let’s not forget those paths and walkways that welcome our friends and family when they come to visit. Not only does landscape lighting illuminate their way, but it can accentuate any unique stone work, pavers or concrete treatments that you’ve chosen to accent your home.
Expand Your Living Space with Landscape Lighting
Expanding your living space to the outdoors gives your home more usable square footage. With the addition of landscape lighting you can spend more quality time enjoying the outdoors after the sun goes down. Adding hardscape and underwater lighting around a pool extends swimming time and offers a safely-lit, appealing area for family time and other gatherings.
Furthermore, landscape lighting allows for you to easily navigate your outdoor kitchen after dark and even sets the mood for outdoor dining. You can also add ambiance to seating and gathering areas like your fire pit, gazebo, deck, fencing and steps. As a result, you will delight in spending more time in your superbly “light-scaped” yard.
Landscape Lighting Provides Safety
Landscape lighting provides much more than just beauty, it adds a great deal of safety to your home. Well-lit paths and walkways allows you and your visitors to see your way safely to the front door, even on the darkest of nights. Importantly, landscape lighting also assists with keeping away unwelcome visitors.
A New York City crime prevention study added outdoor lighting to several housing developments throughout the city. The study concluded that outdoor lighting decreased crime overall by 36% with an additional 7% reduction in violent crime. In general, it makes perfect sense that landscape lighting would deter criminal activity at night.
Other safety features may be added to your landscape lighting, for instance, Smart Lighting or video doorbells, to increase your home’s security and family’s safety.
The Many Ways to Highlight Your Home with Landscape Lighting
Landscape lighting involves much more than simply sticking a few lights along sidewalks and shining a few spotlights on your home. Landscape lighting is as much about style as it is function, highlighting the very things that makes your home special. With this in mind, let’s consider lighting types and techniques that can be used to make your home shine.
Spotlights
Spotlights are the most commonly used lights in landscape lighting. Spotlights can be angled in different directions and placed strategically all around your home and property. Spotlights come in various shapes and sizes, giving you wide and narrow beams of light. Common lighting techniques using spotlights are:
- Highlighting: This is done by placing a spotlight at the base of an outdoor object or feature of a house. The lighting effects can be varied by changing the distance and angle of the light.
- Silhouetting: A technique that is achieved by placing the spotlight behind an interesting shrub, tree or object, back-lighting it and turning it into a dark silhouette.
- Wall Washing/Shadowing: This landscape lighting technique is achieved by shining a softer beam of light onto a wall, painting it with soft light and creating interesting shadows.
- Accenting: Accenting is accomplished by placing a spotlight beam directly on an object or architectural feature of your home, creating a point of interest and drawing the eye to that feature.
Downlights
Downlights are downward angled spotlights used to create lighting interest from above. Downlights are commonly used in trees, on trellises, on top of privacy fences and other high areas. This type of landscape lighting creates the following effects:
- Moonlighting: This creates a soft, natural moonlight effect when placed high in trees or along the eaves of your home.
- Highlighting: Highlighting can also be done with downlights, allowing you to feature seating areas, statuaries and garden areas with a soft, glow of light.
Floodlights
Floodlights are primarily used to illuminate large objects such as walls, signs and trees. Floodlights are also the first choice of lighting when it comes to safety and security. Floodlights are perfect for lighting up areas around the garage, the second story of your home and tree lines. Be wary of the brightness of the bulb used and try these tips:
- Minimize glare: Since floodlights have such a wide beam, be sure and place the lights away from windows and direct eye-line.
- Use the least bright light for the job: You can save energy and create a softer look with spotlights by choosing a different type of bulb.
Path and Area Lights
Path and area lights are used to illuminate walkways and areas where you may have seating. They are typically placed in the ground alongside paths and sidewalks. Generally, path and area lights are simple with a rod and decorative top. Some specialty path and area lights can be adorned with cut-outs that reflect beautiful patterns of light onto the walkways. There are 3 design options with path and area lights:
- Continuous Lighting: With this technique, the lighting fixtures are placed closer together, allowing the light pools to overlap one another. This technique is often recommended for paths that are uneven to prevent tripping and falls.
- Pools of Light: Pools of light are created by using fewer fixtures and placing them further apart. As a result, you achieve softer areas of light which are perfect for places around your home that already have ambient lighting and along paths that are smooth and even.
- Staggered: Staggering is a landscape technique where path lighting is placed on opposite sides of the walkway to accomplish a zig-zag pattern.
Well Lights
Well lights are underground lights that are used in the same way as spotlights but are hidden from view for aesthetic reasons. Usually this type of landscape lighting is used for:
- Lawns: Since this type of fixture is flush with the ground, it allows for beautiful lighting while staying safe from lawn mower damage.
- Decks, paths and patios: Again, being a fixture that is flush with the ground, this versatile type of lighting can blend into hardscapes seamlessly for a unique look.
- Columns: Well lights are great for illuminating columns and other taller features as they shine from the ground upward, eliminating any shadows or dark spots that a spotlight would create.
Deck and Step Lighting
Landscape lighting includes more than just your lawn, gardens and walking paths. Adding lighting around your deck, on posts, fencing and steps allows you to showcase this gorgeous element of your home as well as providing these three things:
- Adds safety: Landscape lighting on decks and steps prevents tripping and falls as well as illuminates railings and deck edges that might otherwise not be visible in the dark.
- Enhances your outdoor living space: With so many homeowners having outdoor kitchens and dining areas, deck and step lighting enhances these spaces, creates ambiance and allows for safer use.
- Visual Appeal: Decking and wooden privacy fencing oftentimes fades into the darkness. However, with lighting fixtures attached to fences, poles, deck railings and stairs, your deck comes to life with an entirely new look after the sun sets.
Underwater Lighting
Water features add so much personality to your yard by creating soothing sounds and visual interest. Underwater landscape lighting (waterscapes) to ponds, swimming pools and fountains, creates an entirely new look at night as well as:
- Ambiance: Underwater lighting glows and reflects moving water onto surfaces around the feature adding drama and interest.
- Safety: Water features such as pools, waterfalls and streams create a hazard after dark. Underwater lighting makes these features more visible, greatly reducing the probability of an unfortunate accident.
Landscape Lighting the Smart Home Way
Make your landscape lighting work for you by utilizing Smart Home Integration. With Smart Home Integration, your landscape lighting can:
- Come on automatically at dusk, whether you are home or away
- Turn off once the sun rises, saving you money
- Be customized to a schedule you choose
- Be brighter or dimmer, depending on your preferences
- Become a crime deterrent, brightly lit beacon with the push of an emergency button
How Does Smart Home Landscape Lighting Work?
When landscape lighting meets Smart Home Technology, they work hand-in-hand to make your home safer, easier to run and saves you money. Smart Home landscape lighting works by combing AI (artificial intelligence) assistants with lighting.
Simply put, you will be able to control your landscape lighting through Apple Homekit which is an app on your phone. This allows you to program the times you want your landscape lighting to turn on and off, set voice commands to easily turn on an exterior light as needed or use bedside emergency buttons to flood your home with light when you hear a disturbance outdoors.
iTrust Designs and Installs Landscape Lighting for You
iTrust Home Services can be your go-to expert for all of your landscape lighting needs. Your appointment starts with our in-house Design Consultant. She will come to your home and create a personal design board with photos of your home highlighted with how it will look with different types of landscape lighting. Best yet, this private, design consultation is absolutely free and you are under no obligation to sign a contract. Here’s an example of the landscape lighting options iTrust offers:
- Volt landscape lighting and fixtures
- Kichler landscape lighting products
- Lighting color and hue choices
- Caseta smart lighting options
- Whole-home smart lighting options to integrate with your landscape lighting
- Full electrical installation by our certified, licensed electrician
Next, out Smart Home Technician will send an itemized, detailed quote with pricing to assist you in achieving the landscape lighting of your dreams as well as any additional features in which you are interested….With absolutely no high-pressure sales tactics.
Then, once you have chosen the right landscape lighting package to suit your unique style, our technician will go to work installing your new outdoor lighting. With a free, professional design and no-pressure, personalized presentations, you absolutely cannot go wrong with iTrust Home Services.
iTrust’s Promise to you
iTrust Home Services mission is to be the trusted provider of high-value solutions to repair, improve and transform our clients’ homes. We are built on the foundation of superior quality, reliable service and guaranteed satisfaction; resulting in homes that are more aesthetically pleasing, efficient, comfortable and safe.
The Most Stylish House on the Block!
With landscape lighting from iTrust Home Services, you can add beauty, curb appeal and value to your home. We can assist you in keeping your home safer from criminal activity as well as protecting your family and visitors from accidents because of poorly-lit paths, common areas and water features. Call today and make an appointment with our designer for the safest and most stylish house on the block.