Shopping With Steven Tupu: Outdoor Lighting

IF you’re fortunate enough to have outdoor space, lighting it properly “can make a big difference,” said the landscape architect Steven Tupu. “Even a small amount of lighting,” he said, can “change an outdoor space in a really dynamic way.”

Especially when it comes to the “small, forgotten spaces like terraces, back alleys and interior courtyards” that Mr. Tupu specializes in. His firm, terrain-nyc, has won numerous awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects, including a national award for an elaborate rooftop garden in Dumbo, Brooklyn, with broad steps that appear to float on light, and one from the New York chapter of the society for using creative landscaping and lighting in a Brooklyn Heights backyard, where fixtures are strapped to trees to provide dappled illumination from above.

Finding interesting lighting is easier than ever, Mr. Tupu said, since “high-design fixtures” and “sculptural illuminated elements” are now so widely available. “That gives us a bigger range for transforming these spaces.”

But even the most basic fixture — a simple string of lights — can be effective. A set of 10 minibulbs encased in black wire globes that he found at West Elm in Chelsea, for example, would be ideal wrapped around a railing, he said, “when you want illumination around the perimeter of a space.”

Mr. Tupu’s favorite outdoor lighting is the most utilitarian. At Lendy Electric Equipment and Supply Corp. in Little Italy, he liked a string of construction lights in yellow plastic cages, which he thought would be good for illuminating a large backyard.

At the company’s showroom in the Bowery, he found LED rope lighting sold by the foot. Tucking a length of it under a bench or a deck, he said, or running it along the inside edge of a planter would create an unobtrusive glow.

For something that makes a stronger statement, Mr. Tupu suggested an oversize floor lamp designed for outdoor use, like Amax, which he found on the Design Within Reach Web site, or the British designer Ross Lovegrove’s outdoor fixtures, carried at Luceplan in SoHo.

He particularly liked Mr. Lovegrove’s Pod Lens, which he thought would look nice dangling from a tree. Or slip it onto a stake, Mr. Tupu said, and you’ve got “a contemporary take on the tiki torch.”