Our Most Popular Outdoor Lighting Ideas

5 High-Impact Landscape Lighting Trends

It’s an exciting time in the world of landscape lighting. There are many innovations to make your home and property stand out. And many options to make your outdoor spaces your favorite place to be. Read on for our five most popular outdoor lighting ideas:

1. Warm lighting to welcome you home
2. Brighter lighting around walkways & stairs
3. Functional lighting for workspaces
4. High-quality LED lights for decades of enjoyment
5. Light & sound shows for events & holidays

Outdoor Lighting Ideas:
#1 Warm Lighting to Welcome You Home

LED lighting technology has come a long way from its beginning. Now, there are so many color options for all different applications. At LUX Landscape Lighting, we love to create a warm, welcoming atmosphere with your outdoor lighting. As you pull into your driveway at night, it’s a happy sight to see your beautiful home illuminated in clear, crisp light. Here are some tips for lighting the front of your house:

• Light should be a bit brighter around your front door, to create a focal point and aid in visibility.
• Softer light highlights the best features of your home, like interesting wall textures, trim work, dormers, chimneys or other architectural details
• Lighting the edges of the house gives it definition and helps it pop out from the dark background of the night
• Lighting the roofline also orients your house in space, by encouraging the eye to travel around the entire structure
• For driving and parking convenience, lights should be placed around the driveway and near any garages

Outdoor Lighting Ideas:
#2 Brighter Lighting Around Walkways & Stairs

While we typically use uplighting for your home’s features, lighting walkways and stairs is best done by casting the light down, towards your feet. This can be accomplished with path lights, hardscape lights or even moonlighting in the trees. For safety and security, the lighting of walkways, stair and slopes needs to be bright enough to see where you’re going. Often, the most beautiful paths are also a bit tricky to navigate in the dark, as they might curve around landscaping or be made of cobblestones, tiles or other uneven surfaces.

Outdoor Lighting Ideas:
#3 Functional Lighting for Workspaces

It’s not all fun and games outdoors! Sometimes, you need to grill for a group or access your shed in the dark. Outdoor lighting ideas for these work areas need to work for you. Here’s what we suggest:

• The light needs to be brighter, but indirect. You don’t want it shining in your eyes when you’re trying to concentrate.
• The Kelvin temperature needs to be right for the job. Grilling at night requires a warm light, otherwise it’s hard to tell when your food is ready.
• Similarly, color-changing lights are no fun in functional areas! Stick with a steady light.

Outdoor Lighting Ideas:
#4 High-Quality LED Lights for Decades of Enjoyment

It takes the same amount of time and effort to install a cheap landscape lighting system as to install a high-quality one. And the difference between brands truly matters. Outdoor lighting needs to withstand difficult environments. In the Cincinnati area, we go from blazing hot sun to freezing temperatures and ice (sometimes all in one week!). All of this weather takes a toll on system components.

One of the cheaper brands of landscape lighting will have these problems:

• Poor manufacturing quality of all system components, resulting in premature breakdown of the sytem
• Subpar quality assurance with lighting fixtures and controllers, which means more “lemons” make it to the shelves
• Use of less-durable components, which won’t withstand Cincinnati’s freeze-thaw cycles
• Poor quality light output that may look dim, muddy or overly-blue

At LUX Landscape Lighting, we only use lighting brands that we trust to deliver years of dependable service. We regularly test new products and technologies before we offer them for sale. And we prioritize brands that give clear, bright light in a variety of Kelvin temperatures. We offer a few different price points, from the ultra-high-end LUXOR smart landscape lighting to more every-day workhorse options.

Outdoor Lighting Ideas:
#5 Light & Sound Shows for Events & Holidays

For a huge impact, combine an outdoor speaker system with a color-changing smart lighting system for amazing light and sound shows around your property. It sounds pretty epic, and it is. But it’s also fairly simple to do, with the right equipment. Using the connected phone app, we’ve programmed these shows for customers. Once set up, all the customer needs to do is press play. Christmas lights become a snap each year. Customers get creative with their outdoor lighting ideas, celebrating birthdays, the Bengals and more.

When you’ve had your fun with the glitz and glamour, the colored lights stabilize to one configuration. And the outdoor speaker system is perfect for enjoying music, or movies and sports on your outdoor TV. Here’s a picture of the same house with its everyday lighting.

Looking for more outdoor lighting ideas? Check out our Landscape Lighting Trends resource page. We’d love to start a conversation about landscape lighting for your home. Contact us today for a free landscape lighting portrait quote.