When you want to spend more time outside in the delightful Chatham Township, NJ, weather, outdoor lighting can be exactly what you need to stay outdoors long into the night. These creative outdoor lighting ideas can make your front yard the place you most love once the sunsets.
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Driveways
A new plan for outdoor lighting may need to start with the driveway—this is where proper illumination is a must as you come and go. Soft lighting can be beautiful and help you and your visitors navigate the front yard. Your landscape specialists could install low-level lighting that has no visible wires, just an ambient light that makes approaching and entering the driveway beautiful and clear.
Walkways
An extension of the driveway, a walkway provides access to the front entry and can be another space that benefits from strategically arranged outdoor lighting. When your guests arrive after dark, are they greeted with a visible path from parking the car to where they ascend the steps of the front entry? If not, consider with your landscaper whether incorporating lighting along the edges of the walkway would be appropriate. This way anyone visiting your home after dark can see to move safely from one outdoor space to another.
Or would your guests not be impressed with what they see once they arrive? As you consider adding or enhancing an outdoor lighting scheme, you may discover that it’s time for a new paver walkway, one that is wide enough for several people to walk comfortably together to your front door.
Front Steps and Landing
Perhaps even more necessary than creating a clear navigational path from the driveway to the walkway is ensuring that visitors and your family can safely see where they are going along the front entry steps. Not only does it look amazing to have your landscaper incorporate lighting beneath the step risers but having that extra bit of lighting can minimize tripping and falling, too.
A front entry should be a highlight of your home, the space that says “Welcome!” to your friends and family. Upgrading sconces to larger fixtures that produce more light can draw the focus to the entrance. As you discuss lighting, talk about adding spotlights to the stone columns at the entry to increase the presence at night. If you don’t have any defining features at your front door, your landscaper can recommend ways to give your entryway the proper attention it deserves with transformed pillars, posts, and a fresh surface.
Highlight Trees and Landscape Beds
Planning landscape lighting for the front yard can also be the ideal time to bring out those features that don’t take center stage in the daylight such as your favorite landscape bed, an old tree with interesting branches, and a water feature that looks completely different in the nighttime lighting. Your landscape specialists are skilled at maximizing the interplay of light and shadows to make your dark landscape a special picture with the right lighting.
Not only can thoughtful landscape lighting transform your front yard but it can improve the safety of this outdoor space by illuminating dark corners and spaces where guests walk from a parked car to the entrance. Your landscape specialists have so many creative ways to add light to a dark landscape that you might not even recognize your own house once the sunsets.
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