4 Ways to Beautify Your Front Yard with Landscape Lighting in Mechanicsburg and Harrisburg, PA

Improving the curb appeal of your home will have huge effects on how visitors experience your home and how you and your family bond with the home and property as well. One of the best ways to improve the front yard is by adding some intelligent lighting strategies with a layered effect. The end result will allow your landscape to be just as beautiful at night as it is during the day. Here are four ways to beautify your front yard with landscape lighting in Mechanicsburg and Harrisburg, PA.

Use Tasteful Pathway Lights

The most important parts of your front yard, when it comes to lighting design, are the walkway and the driveway. These areas will be the source of your greatest concern in terms of safety and security. Place low-lying pathway lights around the edge of your walkway so as to focus the energy where it’s needed, avoid shadows, and prevent eye contact with the lights. You could take the same strategy along the driveway to provide clear guidance for your arriving guests. Be aware that pathway lights are available in solar models, which are removed from the energy grid and will save on your electricity bill. However, don’t expect them to work after a period of cloudy days or if the solar array is covered in snow. For the purposes of a walkway and driveway, hard-wired pathway lights are better since they’ll stay on whether the sun peeks out from behind the clouds or not.

Spotlight Features

Every front yard should have something beautiful to look at, whether it’s a flower garden, stone statue, a magnificent old tree, a bubbling fountain, or the front facade of the home itself. These features should be spotlighted in your nighttime lighting scheme. Place a few lights at ground level immediately adjacent to the feature you want to spotlight, and point them upwards. This will highlight the textures, accentuate their beauty, and help bring attention to the most important features in your front yard, making it a gorgeous reflection of your style.

Use Trees for Moonlighting

If you have mature trees in your front yard, this is a wonderful opportunity to house some useful light fixtures high up in their canopy (as well as using a spotlight to feature one or two prominent trees). These lights should point downwards in a technique called moonlighting. This ethereal white light will wash through all the branches and leaves on the way down and create a speckled and constantly moving painting of light on the ground, mimicking the light of the moon. It’s a great strategy for further increasing depth of perception in your front yard at night, and add a touch of romance.

Add Texture at “Random”

The remaining dark places in your landscape should be highlighted subtly, to maintain the magic of the night, but provide safety and give the landscape some dimension. Once you and your landscape lighting professionals have finished the bulk of your lighting design and installation, wait until night time and turn everything on. Look for dark spots in the front yard and place a marker in the center of each one. If that spot gets a few hours of sunlight a day, place a solar-powered path light in that spot. The dark areas won’t be such a contrast to the well-lit areas, and your front yard will feel much more complete.