Landscape lighting is becoming a very popular design discipline, because people are thinking about new ways of how to make their homes stand out and how to have their gardens and backyards be as beautiful and interesting during the night as they are in the daytime.
But if you don’t want to go full out and hire an architectural lighting designer, who specializes in combining architecture, electrical engineering and design to create something spectacular, here are some tips how you can use lighting to illuminate the facade of your building and create your very own landscape lighting masterpiece.
Know Your Lights
First and foremost you need to figure out what types of lights you are going to use to illuminate the facade of your building because regular bulbs won’t do when it comes to landscape lighting. Here you will need lights that are able to not only cope with the performance demands that an outdoors light will have but also with the outdoor conditions related demands.
For example, the lamps used as facade lighting need to be very bright so they are able to illuminate larger areas but at the same time they should also be fairly energy efficient so you don’t end up with a huge electricity bill because of the lighting.
Moreover since you probably won’t cover up the lights each time it rains or bring them in when the temperature outside drops, you have to make sure that the lights will work in both cold and hot weather as well as make sure lights are waterproof when used outdoors. Some of the best options in regards to outdoor lights that can be used as facade lighting are solar lights, especially solar lights equipped with LED bulbs. But ultimately you need to figure out yourself, which light will be best suited to your outdoors lighting needs.
Embrace Different Directions
Once you have found your lights, now you can start thinking about how to set them up so they create the most interesting facade lighting. The first thing you can do is play with different light directions and see what looks good. Lighting, especially solar spotlights, can be a unique design element, since they create specific shapes and designs depending on which direction they are turned or what they are illuminating. So use it to your advantage. You can have upwards or downwards light beams or even both and really get interesting lighting patterns.
Accent It
Another great strategy is to illuminate only certain features of your building, that way accenting them and making sure that whenever somebody is looking at your house at night they are seeing these accent features first. On top of that the accent features will differ from house to house, based on which part of the facade you want to illuminate, so even if you and your neighbor both have identical homes your facade lighting could look completely different from theirs.
Some of the most common facade lighting accent features are recesses, they pair very well with linear solar light strips. Any architectural designs like sculptures will work well with upwards turned solar spotlights and even window frames will look good illuminated no matter what lamps you will be using to do so.
Use The Shadows and Silhouettes
And lastly if you really want to dive into the world of landscape and architectural lighting and have very interesting facade lighting, then you can play with shadows and silhouettes and use them to your advantage. You can achieve this in several different ways.
For creating silhouettes, which is called silhouetting, all you have to do is to place a solar spotlight between the object you will be using as your silhouette and the backdrop, be it a wall, a fence or any other similar surface and aim the light towards the backdrop. This way you will be illuminating the wall instead of the object in front of it, which will create an outline of said object, showcasing it in a different light.
As for the shadows, a common practice is to create a soft shadow on house facades by placing a light under a tree or a bush that is growing near the wall and turning it upwards. As the light shines through the foliage the leaves and branches will create interesting shadows on the wall, giving the facade of your house a completely different texture and look.
I hope you will try out some of these building facade lighting tricks as this will allow others to see your home in a completely different and unique way. Who knows, maybe you will even make somebody’s day by having your house lit up and looking pretty.