5 Front Yard Lighting Ideas
Help Your Home Have a WOW Factor after Dark
Lighting the exterior of your home can make a real impact when the sun sets. At Paramount, we’ve been crafting our landscape lighting design expertise for years, and we have several front yard lighting ideas to help you amp up the WOW factor.
- Highlight your home’s texture
- Choose your light temperature
- Create depth of field
- Go for height
- Keep safety in mind
Front Yard Lighting Ideas: Highlight Texture
Houses with an interesting texture like brick or stucco are natural candidates for wall-washing, a technique that creates dramatic shadows. Here’s a good close-up from one of our customers.
Instead of being a blank, black wall at night, this white-painted brick becomes a beautiful canvas. Our next front yard lighting idea shows the property as a whole.
Front Yard Lighting Ideas: Light Temperature
When we say that light has a temperature that can be cool or warm, we don’t mean you can measure it in Fahrenheit or Celsius. We’re talking about Kelvin temperature, which measures how yellow or blue the light looks. This all sounds very technical, but it’s important to know which Kelvin temperature shows your home in its best light. Check out these two examples from the same Paramount customer.
The first option is a warm temperature.
The second option is a cooler temperature.
Which one do you like better? There’s no right answer. It all depends on personal preference. Warmer lights are softer and more welcoming. Cooler lights are more modern and crisp. But we bet you really don’t like one of these pictures. So, it’s important to choose the right light temperature for you. Here are two things to consider:
- The color of your home. Yellower brick may need a cooler light, or your home could turn out looking like a daffodil.
- Your home’s architecture. Traditional architecture or older homes typically look better with a warmer light.
Front Yard Lighting Ideas: Depth of Field
This front yard landscape lighting idea is based on the photography concept “depth of field,” which helps add dimension to a flat picture. At night, your home and the landscaping surrounding it sort of “flatten” into one dark image. Landscape lighting on just your home’s exterior makes it look like a cut-out floating in space. But the picture gets more interesting when you light up taller landscaping features in the yard, like trees, fountains or statues. Here’s an example from our landscape lighting partner, Alliance Outdoor Lighting.
If those trees were simply a black mark against the well-lit house, the picture would feel ominous and off-balance. For another great example, scroll back up to the top of the article. Paramount’s landscape lighting designers illuminated the trees in our customer’s lawn to beautiful effect.
Front Yard Lighting Ideas: Add Height
For best effect, it’s important to light all the edges of your home, including the roofline. The human eye is pleased when it can find the outer bounds of an object. For landscape lighting, sometimes this requires adding lights to the gables or extra fixtures on the ground that reach the peak of your roof. As you can see in this Alliance lighting photo, the eye can travel up and down, left and right to find where the house stops.
If landscape lighting is installed only to light up the front door or bottom level of a home, the results look stumpy and give a feeling of unease to the viewer. (So, if someone says, “Wow,” it would be in a bad way).
Front Yard Lighting Ideas: Safety & Security
Of all our front yard lighting ideas, this one is practical. Landscape lighting is a beautiful way to increase safety and security around your home, with two main goals:
- Make navigating your driveway and walkways safe for yourself and guests
- Discourage criminal activity by bringing light to dark spaces
But we are not talking about glaring motion lights or prison-yard spot lights. Look at this example from Alliance.
That home is gorgeous! And no one is going to trip on the uneven stairs at night. Also, there’s no place for n’er-do-wells to hide, not even behind the bushes or trees. Safe? Check. Secure? Check. Beautiful? Double check.
Interested in getting personalized front yard lighting ideas for your property? See our Landscape Lighting Services page to learn more, or reach out to the Paramount experts for a quote.
