A growing number of people, across a broader economic spectrum and in all parts of the U.S., are looking to spend more time in their outdoor environments. It’s the magic added ingredient that combines the interior with the exterior at all times of the year, and it’s becoming increasingly accessible for homeowners.

Landscape lighting design requires the same art and science that goes into interior lighting, and it must be leveraged onto exteriors to achieve beautiful, effective, and consistent results across the entire residence.
An artistic approach to lighting the outdoor living environment is essential. It’s a creative as well as a technical endeavor, and design is key. As with interior lighting, the concept of layering with outside lighting is incredibly important. It’s possible to create numerous layers from just a few fixtures, whether these are downlights, uplights, or pathlights. Accented lighting can create atmosphere and emotion, and lighting programs can reflect different times of the year or accentuate family events.
While you have to avoid glare and be cognizant of the reflectivity of the object or material you are lighting, outdoor lighting presents more of a blank canvas than interior lighting. This does present risks. Without the more restrictive guardrails of an interior lighting installation, where designers have to work around structural elements of the house and certain furniture that needs to be lit, the variety of outdoor lighting options available can be overwhelming and lead designers to presume that any fixture will work anywhere. However, outdoor lighting requires an equally refined color palette and a super-fine brush in order to achieve the best results.
Related: Adding Outdoor Audio to a Landscape Lighting Project
Outdoor lighting can deliver punches of light where you need them to enhance colors and textures and create atmosphere and emotions. Landscape lighting provides the opportunity to play with shadows, nature, and shapes — bringing the outdoors even more to life, harmoniously.
Many exterior lighting decisions are made in a purely functional way — lighting a path, throwing some light on a tree, or merely ensuring that the light adds to a home’s security. Often, this is after a great deal of thought and money has gone into the lighting within the home. Lighting designers must ensure that this respectful and artful approach continues when moving from inside a home to the outside.

Consistency of a home’s style is key, and when designing landscape lighting the overall picture is incredibly important. Is the house contemporary or historical? How much of the “flavor” of the interior lighting can be carried through to the exterior? The outdoors should never be flooded with lighting. You have to be very respectful, delivering the light where it’s needed to create the effect that you want depending on the type of trees, shrubs, structures, and outdoor furniture. When designing outdoor lighting layers, be mindful that you’re working with nature, which is unexpected and changes with the seasons and time.
Homeowners are beginning to appreciate the importance of lighting design — whether that’s from word of mouth, seeing how beautiful their neighbors’ outdoor spaces are, or from “look books” and lighting showrooms. Manufacturers should always strive to provide their dealers and integrators with the tools and resources to deliver the best possible outdoor lighting. At Coastal Source, we recognize that this means not only providing quality lighting products, but also training and advice for dealers — allowing for a deeper understanding not only of the products that they’re selling, but also the best tactics to sell them.
Outdoor lighting needs to be sold emotionally, and this requires a unique skill set, along with the ability to deploy the correct lighting language. Dealers and integrators should understand and possess the ability to communicate effectively how lighting design can improve end user’s lives, not only aesthetically, but also in terms of their health and well-being.
Valeria Palacios Klein is the lighting design manager at Coastal Source. She has over 14 years of expertise in the lighting design industry, blending creativity with precision.