Shine the right light this season

The best outdoor lighting enhances home, landscape

The lights outside your house serve several functions.

Security? Yes. A lit house is generally a safe house.

Lighting a path? Of course. You want to be able to see well enough to step safely after dark.

Lights also serve to enhance the home and the landscape, highlighting architectural features or a beautiful specimen tree, or creating interesting shadows and highlights.

“These days, it’s primarily aesthetic,” says Bob Lyons, co-owner of Outdoor Lighting Perspectives, specializing in custom outdoor lighting.

But it’s more than just aiming a couple of spotlights at the front of the house. Maximum enhancement is the result of careful placement of a variety of types of fixtures around the home and in the landscape.

“For lighting on the house, I like to keep that really subtle,” says Nashville landscape architect Anne Daigh, who points out that outdoor lighting is an important part of landscape design. “A gentle wash of light is as equally effective as lighting up every corner,” she says.

Throughout the landscape, the best lighting plan masks the fixtures, and all you see is the effect, she believes.

“I’m not a big fan of doing ‘runway lights’ ” – rows of lights lining a sidewalk or driveway. “To me the simplest fixture is the best fixture, one that hides well, and is not intrusive.”

And the less visible the fixture, the better.

“I always try to hide the source of the life, in the shrubbery or in a tree as downlighting,” which creates a “moonlight” effect, Daigh says.

Lyons agrees. His company, with offices and a manufacturing plant on Houston Street in South Nashville, produces a variety of fixtures, including small LED units that “hide out” in the landscape. “The best landscape lighting (hardware) is never seen, day or night,” he says.

A good outdoor lighting design also can add interest to outdoor living spaces after dark.

“People want to enjoy their outside spaces more — decks, screened porches, patios,” Lyons says. “Light a few trees, a nice statue, a water feature. Lights give depth to a back yard. They draw your eye out after dark, and it seems to make the space expand.”

Daigh imagines a landscape with tall trees, for example. “There’s the opportunity to put a downlight from a tree, and shine it on anything you want it to illuminate,” she says. “It’s a very nice effect.”

An uplight installed in the ground is another approach.

“It can carry your eye through the yard at night, away from the house, through to the rear,” she explains. “A hidden light source, the moonlight effect, is a great way to illuminate certain areas of the yard, and a very subtle way to make your yard look larger.”

With an emphasis on outdoor entertaining, special-occasion lights — what Lyons calls “festival lighting” — is gaining popularity.

“We try to do unique things, fun things. We’ll hang big light globes, for instance,” Lyons says. Lighted trees, strings of crisscrossed lights and other creative arrangements provide a festive air to an occasion.

Daigh also recommends party lights to enhance an event.

“String lights give such a wonderful feel to the space. Overhead lighting has become a very popular thing.”

“I recently had an outdoor dinner party and used strings of lights. It really set the stage for a beautiful evening,” says Daigh. “It felt like we were under the stars.”

The best choice? LED

For landscape lighting, incandescent bulbs are out, halogen is old hat. Right now, LED lights are the way to go.

“Most of the business is LED now,” says Bob Lyons, owner of Outdoor Lighting Perspectives. “LEDs allow us to do really small lighting packages, compact sizes that hide out in the landscape but that really pack a punch.”

The initial cost is a bit higher, but there’s a significant savings on energy costs — 20 percent to 25 percent over traditional halogen installations, he says. “If you’re going to be in a house more than three years, it makes sense to go LED.”

Energy efficiency and cost savings over the long run are top considerations, but there’s also another advantage.

“The real savings is not having to replace the bulbs,” Lyons says.

Light up the season

The holidays are here. Time to untangle the Christmas lights!

Lighting expert Bob Lyons has a few thoughts on the subject. His company, Outdoor Lighting Perspectives, also does residential and commercial Christmas lighting (www.nashvillechristmaslights.com).

“Everybody wants little white lights, but we encourage people to try something else” — unique roofline lighting, snowflake lights hung from trees, a colorful lighted wreath, perhaps. Or place a laser light projector in the yard that throws static or moving pinpoints of light onto the front of the house. (A popular brand is BlissLights, www.blisslights.com.)

LED lights are becoming standard in Christmas lighting. “LED for Christmas is so much better now than it was a few years ago,” says Lyons, whose company strung “about a mile of wire and bulbs” on the State Christmas Tree at the Capitol, which will have its official lighting ceremony on Dec. 1 (the ceremony begins at 5:30 p.m.).

Also trending in outdoor Christmas lights:

• Cascading tube or “snow shower” lights to hang from eaves or trees.

• Strings of cascading stars.

• Pre-programmed strings of color-changing bulbs.

• Hanging spheres with cascading lights

• Rope lighting with flashing or alternating colors.

• LED icicles pre-programmed to display alternating colors.

• Cascading snowflakes.

• Clustered light spheres.