We’re talking through our experience adding landscape lighting to our homes and rounding up some of our favorite easy-to-use products.
In This Post
Why Add Landscape Lighting?
We’ve added landscape lighting to every home we own and it continues to offer huge impacts! Before we dive into our guide to transforming your outdoor space with our guide to landscape lighting, we should probably touch on why we’ve added it in the first place. Landscape lighting adds both function and form to an outdoor space. Functionally, it highlights walking paths and elevation changes throughout a landscape for a safe nighttime experience. From a form perspective, landscape lighting absolutely transforms a space at night. It can highlight angles and contours, bring focus to an important area and allow for movement and shadow play.
That said, there are many different types of landscape lighting. Each fixture plays an important role in the overall lighting ecosystem and serves a specific need. Here are the major categories and their functions.
Floodlights + Washlights
Floodlights and wash lights illuminate large areas like entire walls or a wide trellis or landscape feature. The main difference between the two is that a wash light is designed to cast gentle light with soft edges while a floodlight is generally more powerful with a more intense, focused beam. Above, we’ve used wash lights to cast a gentle glow upward from our DIY planter boxes onto our DIY trellis. We love the shadow play and the visual depth that it creates.
Spotlights
Spotlights, as the name implies, are great for lighting up one spot. They throw direct, tight beams of light and are fantastic for lighting trees and architectural details from below. We love the way the spotlights at the front of our Tree House directly illuminate the trunks of the towering pine trees at the front corners of the home. They also cast just enough light upwards to illuminate the bottom row of branches for some interesting shadows that really pop at night.
Path Lights
Path lights are usually on a short vertical pole placed directly into the ground that fires light downward. They’re used to illuminate paths (obviously) or to cast gentle light onto low plants like ground cover. In our placement at the Red House (big landscaping reveal next week!), we’ve positioned them strategically to perform both tasks. They land at a perfect juncture of planter bed, clover lawn and driveway to provide safe passage and magnify natural textures.
Downlights
Downlights come in a couple of different form factors. In our space, we’ve used both types. Near the curve of the driveway and above ‘Lucy’s Tree’ we’ve mounted fixed, downward facing spotlights to the trunks and main branches of the trees. These are affixed directly to the tree with specialized anchors.
At the foot wash station, we’ve mounted a singular tiny pendant light (can you spot it?) that hangs from a tree branch. This allows for gentle swaying of the fixture to create subtle motion. Both styles are designed to create moving shadows on the ground that shifts and changes based on the breeze. Before our consultation with our lighting design company, MoonCast, we didn’t realize just how impactful this style of fixture could be.
Ambient lights
Ambient lights, like the rope lighting that we installed under the built-in benches at our Tree House above, cast a pleasant, general glow without highlighting anything in particular. As our daughter likes to say ‘ They’re just for vibes’. A nice even light, often with an indistinguishable, indirect source. They cast a glow without being visible.
We hope our guide to transforming your outdoor space with every style of landscape lighting is helpful! Keep an eye out next week for the full reveal of our grown-in summer landscape at the Red House. It’s maturing beautifully and we can’t wait to see it explode even further over the next few seasons.
A Few of Our Favorites
We’ve rounded up a few of our favorites below. We’ve used #5 in multiple applications and found the app and programability to be top notch! #6 is a great start if you’re not able to commit to fully-integrated outdoor lighting or just need to add some cozy vibes to an outdoor table setting.
1. carson wall sconce | 2. solar table lamp | 3. 8 pack solar fence lights | 4. orion outdoor solar wall light | 5. white + color ambiance outdoor base kit | 6. set of 2 rechargeable cordless table lamps | 7. outdoor cordless table lamp | 8. merit wireless table lamp | 9. landscape wall wash light | 10. 6 pack solar pathway lights | 11. 8 pack solar pathway lights | 12. plug-in outdoor linkable rope light | 13. solid brass outdoor spotlights
I so appreciate how you all think about movement and shadow in lighting! Question: do you put your lights on timers? I know y’all think so much about the environment, and that’s the one thing that has stopped me from adding landscape lighting: I don’t want to confuse all the critters in our native garden! But I have thought about just having them on for the hour or two we’re awake and might want to hang outside. I really love the impact (and always want to show off our garden, ha!) Curious if you’ve thought through this! Thank you!
Great question! We DO put them on timers, and we’re always adjusting them depending on time of year to get them set juuuust right. We currently have the majority of them set from just before sunset to 11pm (approximately 3-4 hours), and we put them on the dimmest setting.
Love that, thank you!