With outdoor lighting, it’s important to accentuate both the width and the height of home’s facade.
The best architectural lighting is done using well lights that are placed in fairly short proximity to the home. The benefits of well lights for architectural lighting are numerous. First, they cast a wide glow based on the shape of the mouth of the fixture. Secondly, the light angle can be adjusted and angled to illuminate particular architectural features such as columns very effectively.
One additional and very important benefit of well lighting is that the light is not cast into the eyes of the homeowner. Since the lights sit close to the home, and since the light is cast straight up, the owner can look out the window without having any light shining directly in their eyes.
The objective of architectural lighting is to illuminate the home’s features while being discreet as possible with the light source and ensuring that we achieve our objectives of lighting the home from side to side and all the way up to the roof lines.
The home above provided a challenge for illuminating the roof line but there is a very good solution to overcome this challenge.
When the architectural lighting comes from below, your porch roof, 2nd story patios and other architectural elements that protrude from the house hinder the light from fully illuminating that vertical.
So, in order to overcome this challenge, have your outdoor lighting designer/installer place bullet lights at each side of the base of your roof line.
You’ll notice here that the bullet lights actually match the shade of the home. That’s no coincidence. These light fixtures were powder coated to match the exact shade of the home. If you’re like me, when you first saw the close-up of this picture, you went back to review the initial picture to see if you could find these fixtures in that photo. In fact, there are 4 of these fixtures. Each of the 2 protruding roof lines are illuminated by 2 powder coated bullet lights.
Here’s another one for you. These lights are attached to this tree to shadow light or moon light the walkway below. This adds beauty, depth, dimension and last but not least – safety.
Now take a look at these trees from the bottom – can you find the fixtures you see in the close-up above?
It takes a little extra work to install roof line lighting and moon lighting but a professional outdoor lighting designer will be well equipped to not only install this type of lighting but to design the best custom solution for your home.
Look at the beautiful effect of moon lighting a tree.
Enjoy the texture that the soft tree branch shadows cast on your lawn, patio, deck or walkway while enjoying enhanced safety for walking and outdoor living areas.