Designing Landscape Lighting

Choosing What to Light in Your Landscape

This is a very imporant part when designing landscape lighting. This will set the stage for determining the size of transformer or tranformers, the types of lighting fixtures you will need, lamp bulbs and how many fixtures it will take.

The easiest way to do this is to create a drawing of your home and landscape areas. Walk around your property in both the daylight and nightime. Here are some things you should be looking for as you walk around.

Along with the ideas listed below you are also looking for areas that need to be lit for security, safety and any areas that would benefit from nightime illumination.

Landscape Lighting Ideas

Unique features of your home
Front door
Destination spots
Long driveway
Arbors
Gazebos
Trellises
Patios
Pergolas
Rocks/Boulders
Retaining walls
Trees
Pools
Walkways
Benches
Statues
Fountains
Water features
Outdoor fireplaces
Decks
Steps

You can also consider an area outside that you can view from your bedroom, kitchen or favorite window. I'm sure your home or landscape has something that is not listed here, but this list should get your creative juices started.

Once you have a good idea of what you want to light next we will look at different types of low volatge landscape lighting design techniques.