The Future of Landscape Lighting: Emerging Trends & Technology
By Jeff Thomas, Senior Director of Product Management for Lighting, ADI | Snap One
It is easy to feel how lighting can enhance a space, both indoors and outdoors. However, understanding exactly how landscape lighting – by using the right fixtures, positioned and automated properly – can transform an area into a stunning recreational space is a nuanced challenge.
When consumers have firsthand experience with lighting, it helps them truly understand the value it brings to a property. This presents an excellent opportunity for most distributors to help consumers recognize the benefits of having systems professionally designed and installed. With summer right around the corner, outdoor spaces like the yard, patio, and landscape are top of mind.
Best of all, lighting options are endless and usually make for quick jobs, making it a relatively easy sell compared to other home tech offerings. Before you race to jump into your next outdoor lighting project, however, let’s explore the current trends shaping the category. Innovation is the name of the game, and staying up to date with current trends keeps your business ahead and your customers happy.
Rooted in the Unexpected
Outdoor spaces are full of opportunity — and it’s important to think outside the box and extend systems to other, possibly lesser-known, spots in the yard for greater visual interest in the property.
Outdoor fixtures come in all shapes and sizes, such as linear tape lighting. As such, they can be discreetly applied — on the underside of steps, tucked within the capstone of a handrail, or recessed into the eaves, to name a few examples. Solutions like Control4’s Vibrant Linear Lighting make this kind of seamless, architectural integration easier than ever, offering flexibility and a broad range of lighting effects. Lights that resemble tiles can be recessed around a swimming pool or laid within a driveway, blending into their environments.
Systems that combine audio and lighting, like the Episode Radiance outdoor audio and lighting system, can further elevate outdoor areas by combining ambiance and entertainment through a single fixture, making it easier to accentuate unique corners of the yard.
Leveraging Simplicity & Modernism
Fixtures that utilize LED technology for greater efficiency and longer lifespans are becoming a top choice for outdoor lighting — and they are subtle fixtures that blend into surroundings.
Leveraging the timeless, sophisticated aesthetic of a simple form factor, these fixtures are designed to withstand all weather conditions. The trending fixtures of today combine style with substance, marrying durability and ruggedness with elegance and beauty. For luxury-focused projects, new options like Lux by Control4 offer an added layer of refined design and personalization, enabling integrators to meet both performance and aesthetic expectations.
Evolving Components for Ever-Changing Natural Environments
The outdoors is a living, breathing entity that morphs and evolves continuously, meaning the landscape and topology you’re dealing with today will likely be different a few years down the road as trees and plantings grow, decks are added and expanded, and various areas are cleared and resurfaced for new gardens. As a result, outdoor lighting needs to be able to adjust accordingly. This has inspired the design of fixtures with interchangeable parts — instead of ripping an old fixture out and replacing it with a new one, fixtures can shift location easily, and lenses can be swapped to create the newly desired effect.
Elevate the View: Lighting from Above
Outdoor spaces tend to be illuminated at ground level, but it’s crucial to remember the areas above eye level, too. A great example of this is when lighting designers and landscapers place lights high up in certain trees, angling the fixtures downward to create a moonlight effect. They also might choose to place a few lights at the base of a tree, shining upward to accentuate the tree bark, the textures, and a canopy of leaves. When implementing this technique, lighting designers should remain cognizant of light pollution and make sure that the lighting is focused and is directly hitting the trees and surrounding foliage as much as possible to avoid lighting that shoots directly into the sky.
Setting the Mood with Color Temperature
Similar to the fashion industry, some lighting trends should be avoided. For example, setting the color temperature of outdoor fixtures at a cool, “moonlight” tone is often a go-to approach. Moonlight is beautiful, and it occurs naturally at night, so emulating the effect with outdoor lighting might seem like a good idea; however, unfortunately, the comparison doesn’t translate. Artificial “moonlight” puts off a cold, harsh, bluish hue, which, while good for security purposes, is certainly not design-friendly. For a warmer, subtle glow that’s more pleasing to the eye, the color temperature of outdoor fixtures should be set at 2200-2700K.
Intelligent Illumination of Bright Ideas
Customers are looking for lighting options that look and feel luxurious, not obnoxious, fueling a desire for greater control – a standard on/off switch no longer does lighting justice. To elevate the lighting experience, divide the layout into zones, create custom lighting scenes, and automate the fixtures to dim and brighten under certain prescribed conditions. The operation of outdoor lighting must evolve alongside the fixtures themselves. Integrating advanced control solutions like Control4 enables intuitive access and aesthetic harmony across the system.
As we take outdoor lighting up a notch, make sure to stay up to date with industry trends. Manufacturers offer countless designs and technologies to support more beautiful, functional, and customizable outdoor illumination that your clients will embrace with open arms.
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