The Best Outdoor Lighting Ideas for Entertaining
How to Establish Ambiance with Outdoor Lighting
Extend your entertainment space by opening up your outdoors for your next event. Whether you’re hosting a casual barbecue, an elegant dinner party, a lively swim soiree, or a romantic date night, delight your guests with the magnificent glimmer of your gardens. Outdoor lighting plays a crucial role in amplifying your aesthetics and ensuring safety. By incorporating various illumination types and techniques, you can fashion functionality and help exude a desired mood. Learn about the types of landscape lighting and how to set the tone for summer entertainment with these outdoor lighting ideas.
The best outdoor lighting ideas allow visitors to see the big picture by bringing the entire landscape into focus at night.
Types of Outdoor Lighting
First, it’s important to understand the various lighting options and how each best serves its purpose. While some lights are designed to brighten the immediate surroundings, others are intended to emphasize a particular object.
Ambient Lighting
Ambient lighting allows you to move about with ease by creating a comfortable level of general illumination to view the overall area for various activities.
Recessed lighting
Recessed lighting is installed into the ceiling of a covered structure and is the ideal choice for enhancing the view in outdoor rooms. Usually dimmable, their radiance can be raised or lowered to establish the right ambiance for dinners, parties, or a quiet night at home.
Wall Lighting
Mounted to the exterior walls to enhance the architectural features of your home and provide general, usually soft illumination. Lanterns and sconces are excellent outdoor lighting ideas available in a range of styles to suit your aesthetics. Pairing them can be useful to highlight doorways, and when used in numbers, they can be ideal to radiate enough glow for large gatherings.
String Lights
Festive, affordable, and portable, string lights are easy to install, rearrange, and remove for social gatherings.
Task Lighting
These purposeful lights provide ample glow for function and safety. They can help inspect a steak for the perfect sear, navigate a winding walkway, or ward off intruders.
Grill Lights
These task lights are essential to the grill master to see in order to achieve the ultimate meal for his or her guests.
Pathway Lighting
Designed for safety, security, and beauty, pathway and deck lighting can carefully guide your guests to their intended destination and create a sense of intrigue. This type of lighting can be installed directly into the landscape or hardscape such as decks, steps, and walkways.
Flood Lights
Cast a wide safety net of harsh brightness by installing floodlights on the sides of your home and garage for added security. Note that these lights are not ideal for entertaining, unless your plan is to put someone in an extreme spotlight.
Our Desco project balances dramatic uplighting and downlighting to highlight the landscape and sculpture, and illuminate an outdoor seating area.
Accent Lighting
Bring your favorite landscape features into view with focal lighting. Create drama and visual interest by highlighting architectural trees, poignant plants, or your favorite garden sculpture.
Uplighting
Illuminate structures by positioning lights upward. Highlight your towering cedar’s canopy, magnify the leaves of your Japanese maple, or show off that sultry, new sculpture.
Downlighting
Lower your focus toward attributes that might otherwise get lost in the dark. Generate a glamorous glow toward your garden beds, cast a wave of wonder from your water features, or entertain guests under an awe striking arbor.
Pool Lighting
Pool lighting often combines both accent and ambient lighting for both ambiance and functionality. The ambient lighting surrounds a swimming pool with an overall glow. With today’s LED technology, the colors and intensity can often be adjusted from a smartphone app to create different scenes and moods. Accent lighting can be up to three times the intensity, useful for steps, decks, and creating spotlighting water features.
Don’t Forget Fire
Let’s face it. Not everyone wants to put their beach bodies into the spotlight. This outdoor lighting idea keeps modesty in mind by utilizing soft fire light so guarded guests can feel less on display. Fire can also set a soft tone, rekindle connection, and ward off a chill after an evening swim.
Spectacular layered lighting ushers in a relaxing evening and brings these striking Ann Sacks tiles into focus.
Setting the Mood
The overarching goal of successful landscape lighting is to achieve soft, subtle, simplicity. From relaxing and romantic to decadent and dramatic, outdoor lighting should evoke an innate emotion that surrounds you with feeling. Rather than a bold beam emitting a detectable blast, the light should blend naturally into the architecture and landscape. Effective landscape lighting emits an intimate elegance. You shouldn’t see it; you should feel it.
Set the scene for romance with a cozy loveseat and soft, solar lanterns from Dedon. (Hocker design, Bonick installation)
Cast a spell for the senses by selecting the consummate quality and tone of light for your outdoor environment. The color temperature of your landscape lighting affects how your eye perceives color, creating a psychological impact by rendering the right mood. Experiment with creating contrast and showcase areas in a different light by blending the two.
Warm Up
Lower temperature light enhances warmth. Amplify your architecture and plants with truer colors or create drama with dancing shadows among the trees.
Cool Down
Utilize higher temperature light to mimic the moon and cool down the ambiance. Choose cool tones to highlight pools and blue-toned plants like blue spruce.
Enlist Our Creative Professionals
Finally, for the ultimate in outdoor lighting ideas, enlist the assistance of our landscape professionals. Our creative team of designers, installers, and lighting technicians can create striking outdoor water features, source and install your landscape lighting, and perfect your optimal outdoor optics for your entertaining spaces. Contact us to illuminate your next party.
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