Exterior Lighting Design and Installation
Highlight the most attractive features of your property at night.
Outdoor lighting illuminates real estate to heighten security and make a more enjoyable ambiance. Walls sconces add dimension to flat surfaces, and accent lights rake walls for texture. Pot lights placed in the ground will glow your home’s foundations or the bottom branches of trees to add depth to your green lawns. Garden lights trace winding paths and all this should work together in a moonlit symphony to make an inviting nocturnal scene.
Floodlights are the most overused outdoor landscape lights, employed to brighten large areas, they make a flat nightscape. They’re often deployed on the sides of commercial buildings because they’re good for surveillance. LED spotlights on the other hand, should be used around your home to pinpoint and exhibit the most interesting and unique architectural features of your property.
Choose JML Electric for Exterior Lighting Design
Watch your property come alive each night and take on new dimensions with a custom lighting scheme installed by JML Electric. Our designers use light to transform your home’s exterior and change its appearance, adding security and epic style.
Commercial exterior lighting illuminates your buildings, sidewalks and parking lots while residential lighting glows your house, walking paths and tree boughs.
Exterior Lighting Design Considerations
What makes an attractive nightscape? After designing and installing hundreds of high end exterior lighting schemes, we’ve formed some opinions on what it takes to make an award-winning night scene. We’ve lit posh houses and heritage buildings and so we know how to make your home and garden look terrific. But your property’s midnight curb appeal is just one of six criteria we consider when designing exterior lighting solutions.
What Makes a Good Exterior Lighting Scheme?
Creating the perfect exterior lighting design means considering more than physical beauty, colour and depth-of-field. We have to factor in the overall style, form, and function of the installation. Does the layout increase or reduce security? Is there enough light to safely park your car and walk the paths? Take a stroll around the perimeter of your house or commercial building at night and survey the structure from all angles. There should be luminance no matter where you look, and accent lights should add new dimensions and showcase architectural features which are less visible during the daytime.
Criteria for Creating Exterior Lighting Designs
- How bright is it? Let us agree, intensity matters. Brilliant LED lights must be adjustable. The ideal illumination is a delicate balance where everything is visible but nothing shines. Flat walls need texture, and white walls need colour. Most homeowners want their house to ‘pop’ and their physical address to be visible from the street, but everything else should be soft and easy on the eyes.
- Uniform coverage doesn’t mean uniform intensity. The best, most efficient, and frankly most interesting lighting designs have hotspots and drop-offs which vary from place to place around the property. Your new lighting design should provide adequate illumination for security, and for personal and vehicular navigation, but let’s not try and glow every tree branch or blade of grass on the lawn. Good lighting designs are selective and should only highlight the most unique features of your home or garden and not try and light-up the whole house until it’s visible from space. In the backyard, gazebos and pergolas, small fountains and even bird baths can become the breathtaking centerpieces and not simply washed with floodlights.
- Good lighting designs have different types of light doing different things. Pathway lighting is different than accent lighting. Pool lights illuminate the depths while reverse pot lights glow trees to add depth and dimension to the farthest reaches of your realm.
- Exterior lighting makes residents feel safe and secure. Good lighting schemes enhance safety by illuminating entranceways, stone paths, uneven ground and stairs. The scene you’re making should be bright enough to deter intruders, but seem warm and inviting to residents and guests. Good lighting can be paired with security camera coverage for improved surveillance.
- Stylish exterior lighting designs have patterns and cohesion. The lighting fixtures we select, and their individual effects should blend into a uniformly attractive nocturnal scene. Each of these sources, no matter how soft or unassuming should compliment the overall picture and not call attention to themselves or expose incongruous elements. White walls, shiny metal rails and even glass windchimes should not be allowed to ruin the collage.
- Competent lighting designers balance colour temperatures. Experienced lighting technicians, JML staff are familiar with all lamp elements and well aware of how they make different colours and qualities of light. Fluorescent, LED, Tungsten, Hydrogen-Mercury Iodide, and Sodium lamps all have different colour temperatures, intensities and properties. The color temperature of the lights (measured in Kelvins) should feel appropriate and blend seamlessly into the environment. Tungsten filaments (now simulated) cast a warm yellow light which is about 2700 to 3000 degrees Kelvin, while LED makes a hotter, 5600 to 6000 degree white light. New energy saver bulbs are made one colour or another. Generally speaking, tungsten bulbs are often employed around a house, while LED lights are used on the property to more effectively simulate moonlight. LED beam lights can be set near cameras to increase security in residential and commercial settings.
Testimonial from a Satisfied Customer:
Condo Streetlight Repairs
10 stars! Nicki and Tim at JML Electric are awesome. They’re super responsive, professional, knowledgeable and efficient, and they offer prompt, friendly, excellent service. Highly recommend for any electrical projects / repairs. We appreciate your efficiency & flexibility. Excellent quick turnaround time. Tim did an excellent job, You’re our new streetlight team for sure!
Regards, Jill from Mississauga
