Landscape lighting can contribute a great deal to the late-night ambience of your Croton, NY, outdoor living space. Not only can it transform the mood of your patio, making it cozier and more intimate, but it can also enliven other spaces like the outdoor kitchen and poolside. Here are a few ways in which you can enhance the look and feel of your outdoor spaces using landscape lighting.

Lighting walkways

6 Ways to Utilize Lighting to Enhance your Croton NY Landscape

Ensuring that your walkways are always well-lit is a practical measure that keeps people safe. However, walkway lighting can also contribute further beauty to your landscape after dark. Garden lamps, vintage fixtures, or small, inconspicuous lights can line a walkway, or be embedded into an adjacent retaining wall. They should be downturned or capped, however, to prevent an unpleasant glare.

Lighting retaining walls

The lights attached, or embedded into, retaining walls are often placed beneath the coping. The coping acts as a cap to the fixture to avoid creating too much light. Illuminating your retaining walls can transform these simple, functional structures into eye-catching elements in the design of your backyard. This form of lighting also tends to create a striking three-dimensional look that transforms the layout of a landscape. Any shrubs and flower beds that line the wall will be highlighted in the process.

Spotlighting

Narrow lighting that focuses on a single point in the landscape can have a wonderfully dramatic visual effect. These lights can be placed, upturned, at the base of trees and lawn sculptures in order to highlight their intricate details and establish the focal points of your landscape. Ensuring that your landscape possesses specific focal features simply makes it more interesting to explore - an effect that can be achieved through the strategic use of landscape lighting. Using direct light to highlight an accent wall can also help to define an important outdoor room.

Silhouetting

Silhouetting is another way to achieve a landscape that turns heads and looks dramatic after dark. This technique entails backlighting certain features in order to display their silhouettes. Trees, shrubs and sculptures can be used to cast interesting shadows that further personalize your landscape. While backlighting specific features is an effective way to create captivating shadows, features can also be moved near other lights in the landscape to achieve the same effect using a different approach.

Experimenting with unexpected colors

Washing an area in colored light is an interesting way to influence the mood of a particular outdoor living space. It should be noted, however, that this technique should be approached with subtlety and tact. Moonlighting is a lighting technique in which a light fixture is placed in a high spot, like a tree, and emulates the look of moonlight. Some homeowners opt for a blue tinge, as it has a more enchanting visual effect. Pool lighting is also commonly executed in blue to enhance the serene, resort-like atmosphere of the space.

Decorating living spaces

Decorative lights, such as paper lanterns and gem-colored lamps, don’t contribute a lot of light but can add plenty of character to an outdoor room. They can be used to draw attention to specific features, or make an area feel more festive. Consider weaving fairy lights into your trees, or around your pergola, for a romantic touch.