Tripping the light fantastic is fine for a night out on the town. But tripping on your walkway because your lighting is not fantastic isn’t cool. The bumps, scrapes, and bruises that can result are bad enough. But if a visitor is injured and decides to sue for damages, the pain that your wallet will sustain may be frightful!
Fortunately, landscape lighting offers lots of pathway lighting options that combine practical functionality with stylish elegance.
Lots of Options for Lighting the Way
The simplest approach to lighting your landscape pathways is with the installation of lights along the border of the path. There’s a wide array of styles available for these path lights, including post lights and lanterns.
Another option is to install recessed lights that are embedded into the surface of the walkway. The great advantage of recessed lights is that they don’t pose obstructions that must be avoided by pedestrians, drivers, or landscape maintenance workers. Pedestrians can walk right over them with no harm done to people or to lights. A disadvantage of recessed lighting, though, is that maintaining the lights or replacing bulbs is more difficult and time-consuming.
If you’ve got lots of tall foliage bordering your walkways, you might want to dispense with the subtlety of recessed lighting and small border lighting, and go bold with tall and elegant path lights.
Don’t Forget the Stair Steps…
A clearly lit walkway with stair steps at either end that are swimming in darkness is still an accident waiting to happen. But by using the proper techniques, steps can be lit unobtrusively but effectively.
Most typically, a light is installed in the vertical face of each step, and positioned so that it illuminates the preceding step. Louvers over the lights assure that the lights shine down upon the steps, and not up into the eyes of pedestrians.
A less unobtrusive but easy and practical method of illuminating stair steps is to simply install post lights along the stair step boundaries.
A Two-for-One Deal…
Safety achieved with beauty and style. A dark and treacherous pathway transformed into a safe and enchanting journey through an elegant nightscape.
It’s not often that functional practicality is achieved without sacrificing a bit of aesthetic grace. But by installing pathway lighting in your landscape, you’ll add both safety and beauty – a real two-for-one deal.
Bob
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Bob Carr | TLC Incorporated | Landscape Lighting | Maryland | Landscape Lighting Installation | Landscape Lighting DC | Home Maintenence Tips