Professional Landscape Lighting

Many homeowners often think that since any number of nationwide, branded retailers offer enormous selections of exterior lighting fixtures for houses, yard decorations, and landscaping fixtures that they can save on service costs by selectively purchasing attractive fixtures and positioning them in key places that require functional lighting or decorative accent light. This never pays off in the long run, however, because retail-grade outdoor light fixtures are not built to withstand the elements, and they are also more difficult to network into Lutron Grafik Eye lighting controls, home automation networks, and sophisticated lighting arrays.

A professional organization like Illuminations Lighting and Design carefully studies your home and surrounding property and spends extensive time in consultation with you to learn the many preferences and particulars of your individual lifestyle. Outdoor lights are selected to accent and magnify your home environment on an intensely personal level, and careful attention is paid to a number of very important factors that only a trained outdoor lighting contractor can properly assess to develop a system of outdoor lights and lighting controls.

Theme and Style
The theme and style of residential landscape lighting reflects your personality, the physical architecture of your house, the style of the homes in your neighborhood, and even the geography in which you are located.

Homes in River Oaks often look like stately Old World mansions and feature classical fountains and statuary in their yards that require art lighting. Houses along Memorial often reflect early American or colonial architecture, whereas many fine homes in Bellaire feature a blend of traditional architecture and eclectic customization.

These architectural styles have to be considered when choosing outdoor garden light fixtures in order to build a system with complimentary aesthetic. Landscape lighting professionals work to enhance the architecture and location of a home, never diminish it, with the physical style and size of the outdoor light fixtures we install.

Architecture and Whole House Lighting
Many outdoor architectural lights are specifically designed to easily mount to the exterior of the house itself. Knowing where to put them, however, represents the greatest challenge to the do it yourselfer. If the lighting angles are not correctly calculated, house lights will cause light pollution and glare that overwhelm the architecture and spill into neighboring yards and windows. Landscape lighting professionals are trained in special techniques that enable them to install outdoor lights from concealed positions that place just enough light on the house without casting shadows or shining light into the house next door.

These skills are especially valuable in Houston suburbs such as Pearland, The Woodlands, and Sugar Land where families often have early bed times due to the need to get up early for long commutes and getting young children to school on time.

Landscape Lights
Outdoor light systems can be installed in such a way as to unite Nature and human architecture into a balanced, aesthetic whole. Special tree, path, garden, and outdoor path lights can be configured into an illuminated network of natural vantage points serve as points of aesthetic definition and function as practical anchors for critical fixtures, transformers, and landscape lighting accessories necessary to linking system components together.

Some Houston companies, such as Illuminations Lighting and Design, are now beginning to use exclusively environmentally-friendly outdoor tree lights and install them using special techniques that protect trees from scarring and ensure their future growth.

In Royal Oaks, these techniques have worked hand in glove with unique deed restrictions landscape and whole house lights in lieu of prohibited streetlights.

Deck and Patio Outdoor Lights
As homeowners cut personal fuel budgets and increasingly entertain at home, deck lights and patio lights have risen in popularity throughout Houston neighborhoods such as Spring Valley, Hedwig Village, West University, and Rice Village.

Deck lighting can be done with minimal power costs by using a combination of led lights and lighting controls, making it possible to have cool-burning lights left on throughout the night into the wee hours of the morning.

Security Lights and Alarm System Integration
Residential lighting professionals can make even the most powerful, High Intensity Discharge outdoor security lights cost effective by linking them to lighting controls and motion sensors that only turn the main floodlights on if human body movements are detected.

Perimeter lighting can be handled with a variety of low voltage lighting fixtures that keep shadows away from the corners of the house and yard.

You can also have your security lights linked your existing alarm system, and we can install manual controls that will enable you to instantly turn on every indoor and outdoor light in the event of suspicious activity or impending home invasion.

Working with the professionals at Illuminations Lighting Design combines the value of commercial grade outdoor light fixtures and the advanced design and electrical skills of one of Houston's premier electrical and design service firms.

source:www.articlesbase.com

Resort Lighting Is A Reflection Of Luxury

Lighting is a reflection of luxury. It combines the Universal, the functional, and the aesthetic in a phenomenon that is both a science and an art. Resort lighting represents the highest level of sophistication found in the lighting design services industry, representing a synthesis of multiple disciplines applied in such a fashion as to separate and elevate the experience of a luxury resort to the level of the timeless and the impeccable.

Commercial resort landscape lighting is rapidly rising in demand and popularity as management teams realize the need to showcase the entirety of a property as a single point of differentiation from the world of daily life. Light is an absolutely essential component to resort design, being essential to clear visibility of the grounds at twilight and nighttime hours.

It bears noting at this point that truly superior resort and hotel lighting must address interior facilities with equal attention to detail and finesse as that paid to the external layout of the grounds themselves. Without this, the uniqueness of the experience will diminish when guests enter the building.

Every element of the resort must be addressed as a unique, individual component of an interconnected whole. The restaurant is set apart for romance, conversation, and sublime escape from the mediocrities of ordinary life. The banquet hall is both decorated and illuminated with lighting themes that invite to celebration. Layered landscape and architectural lighting arrays emphasize the multi-dimensional elements of natural beauty blended with the finest human engineering and design. Pathways, outdoor dining areas, boardrooms, tennis courts, and even parking lots are both lit for safety and decorum, contributing like strands in a web of light to the exclusive world that resort lighting creates.

A balanced, systematic, and truly holistic resort lighting design creates this type of harmony between natural, architectural, decorative, and activity themes in every single element of all indoor and outdoor points of interest.

The key to creating this lighting-as-experience phenomenon lies in a wider selection of top-grade, commercial equipment that enable us to create more levels of light than competing firms deliver. Many landscapers, for example, blend only two levels of light to illuminate trees and pathways. Some vendors, however, exceed these standards with proprietary equipment that allows them to create additional layers of luminary embellishment to landscaping features.

This involves studying both the landscape and the architecture of the facility to determine common angles of incident between man-made designs and natural formations. This allows us to subsequently unite buildings with landscapes in a manner that results in a more aesthetic presentation of the entire property.It is also necessary for the design firm to create clear visibility through indoor windows into greenways and atriums on the other side of the glass. Again, layered lighting and superior knowledge of architectural angles of incidence are required to accomplish this delicate balance without generating excess glare that can distort the view. Normally, this level of knowledge is only obtained by lighting companies who form strategic partnerships with architectural firms and who cross train their employees in the basics of building design. This creates an awareness of certain critical elements of building interiors, special facilities, dining areas, and meeting rooms that a firm that specializes in lighting only seldom, if ever, notices.

It also helps for a resort lighting vendor to have an above-average knowledge of fine art lighting and design. Any resort serious about contracting fine art lighting and design services should first make certain the vendor they select has an equivalent knowledge of lighting and automation controls, as the equipment used for art lighting requires both precision adjustment and the ability for quick and simple end-user interface.Every resort lighting theme is unique and individualized to the particular location and nature of both the property and the corporate brand. The best outcomes are achieved in consultation and partnership between resort managers and lighting vendors who recognize the need for a high level of custom planning and ongoing consultation and partnership in order to achieve a truly lasting, and superior, presentation at the end of the day.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com

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Path Lighting: Add Lighting and Security to Walkways, Decks and Accent Features

When we built home we thought we had covered every detail - from the mortgage rate to the lighting. What we forgot about was path lighting. After closing on our home and finished moving everything in , we set up for our first night. Looking outside all we could see was a long dark driveway and realized we did not take into account any outdoor garden lighting to illuminate the area. No paths or walkway lights, low voltage malibu lights - nothing.

Landscape Path Lighting for Added Security
My wife and I quickly noted it was very unsafe to have no lighting leading up the path or walkway to our house. We decided to be creative and illuminate our walkway with outdoor solar garden lighting instead of low voltage lighting kits. The outdoor garden lights look dimmer and boast an almost golden glow.

We put a small pond equipped with a little giant pump and put some outdoor solar lights with a copper look to them around the pond. We then planted several liriope as a border, a few small shrubs along with some annuals for flowers throughout the area and put more garden/path type lights allowing the lights to softly illuminated the plants.

Solar Lighting - Not Enough Light
We quickly discovered that solar lights were not a good choice for us to actually light up our walkway in all regions. We decided to go the low voltage lighting route instead. As we totaled up our outdoor lighting needs our total hit 67 lights and with a number that high the monthly electric bill would be running high - even with low voltage landscape lights.

We compromised - we focused on lighting close to the walkway first. These needed to be brighter so we went low voltage lighting in this area. The solar lights were used further away from the house. The initial cost for the outdoor garden lighting was affordable. The price difference between solar and electric outdoor garden lights was surprisingly minimal.

We used a few electric lights at the back of the yard. This added security. The solar lights were a perfect accent to the yard. The solar outdoor garden lighting did come in handy if the electricity went out or if we forgot to turn on the electric garden lights. We were both satisfied that with a little time and hard work we were able to create our own original walkway with a few plants a few statues and some great outdoor garden lighting.

Source: http://www.plant-care.com/

Architectural Landscape Lighting

Architectural landscape lights should work to unite the manmade and the natural in a manner that is compliant with regulatory codes and affordable for your clients. While landscape lighting represents a focus on illuminating and magnifying points of interest in the natural scenery, architectural landscape lighting creates the sense that buildings and technology are in harmony with Nature and establishes a more unified presentation to anyone viewing the facility at night.

Developing an architectural landscape lighting system that will remain true to this intention without costing additional money down the line requires a great deal of planning and research. You will have to determine all the necessary photometric requirements of the system, locate specification grade equipment made in the United States by manufacturers who emphasize quality over quantity, and be willing to use pioneering technologies that many of your clients may not yet understand, but can quickly be educated in if you can just find the time and resources to show them all the benefits you can bring to their table.

For example, one of the most costly components in any architectural landscape lighting system has always been any type of incandescent luminaire, such as a quartz floodlight, that consumes too much electricity in comparison to the light it produces. Not only does this waste money, it violates recent dark sky laws in most places, and it also results in ongoing replacement costs as they fixtures inevitably burn out. Newer fixtures that rely upon electronically ballasted fluorescent lamps, improved HID sources, and now LED light bars deliver a better quality of lighting and comply fully with the recent crackdown on light pollution.

By investing now in specification grade architectural landscape lights, you can save your clients money on excessive energy bills and help them avoid a possible parts shortage that could hit those who wait until the last minute to replace mercury vapor and incandescent lamps. Instead, propose to them architectural landscape lights that feature fluorescent lamps and ballast controls with superb CRI, LED's that can save as much as 80% on power consumption, and HIDs featuring higher than ever LPW efficiency rating, you generate savings that translates into ROI and recession proofing the Spartan budgets of a very cautious and somewhat nervous customer base. You can do this too without sacrificing the visual component of the system as well. Our new generation of architectural landscape lights not only performs better than the previous generation of technology, but it actually features more attractive, diversified and decorative fixture housings in a variety of fixture housings and finishes heretofore unimagined.

RLLD Commercial Lighting's inventory includes everything from decorative fluorescent bollards, post mounted lights, LED Street lighting for industrial parkways and private thoroughfares, super energy saving low voltage landscape lights of every variety, and HID floodlights that can output more light with less energy than ever. All of our lighting fixtures, without exception, are made by world-class US manufacturers who produce them in domestic factories located within our borders. Because our sources are exclusively American, we ensure both quality and compliance and also pass on manufacturers' warranties unavailable to cheaper parts procured from overseas channels.
One additional benefit we deliver to both small and large companies alike is supportive, adjunct lighting design services with every purchase of architectural landscape light fixtures. We have invested a great deal of money in proprietary lighting design software that enables us to calculate the precise photometric requirements for optimal foot candle density and directional lighting control that you need to build a truly winning proposal. By nailing down the technical and regulatory details first, we can then help you focus on finding fixtures and accessories that add aesthetic value to your client's location. This in turn enables you to creating an architectural landscape lighting system that is customized to the exact parameters of your client's site and guaranteed to perform reliably with a minimum of maintenance for years to come.

source:http://www.articlesbase.com/managements/architectural-landscape-lighting-699414.html

Landscape Lighting - Add Security and Accents to Your Home and Landscape

Landscaping lights add a touch of color to your gardens. By using landscape lights in your yard, you not only add security to your home, as well as add beauty and style. You can add lights to any landscape design. Installing solar lights in your front or backyard is an easy chore that almost anyone can do himself or herself.

Landscaping Lights for Added Security
Solar yard lights are a great way to give yourself a little added security for your home. Lights will brighten darker areas in the yard as well as making it easier to see steps or offsets in your landscape.

Accenting The Garden
A great way to enhance your garden area is by installing solar outdoor lights. You can find all kinds of different styles of lights to enhance your landscape design. Lighting fixtures for the yard are usually inexpensive ways to add charm and style to any area. These fixtures make a great feature in rock gardens and flowerbeds.

Different Types of Landscape Lights
Lights for the yard are usually powered by two different sources. One option is line low voltage fixtures that get their power from your homes electrical system. Wires are run underground. These are used more for larger landscaping ideas and are better for someone who has some experience with electrical work.
Outdoor solar lighting fixtures have a solar cell that absorbs energy from the sun and stores it in rechargeable batteries. These types of lights are less expensive; however how long and bright the light shines depends on the amount of sunlight it has stored in it. With a few clicks, these lights are put together and installed.

Great Ways To Use Landscape Lighting to Decorate
Lighting fixtures can be used to decorate any yard. Use them to line a walkway or path to the house. Not only will they add light they will also add charm and style to any home. If you decide to use the electric lights, you can change the light bulbs in them to coordinate with any holiday. Use red and green for Christmas, or pastel colors for the spring and Easter holidays. This is a fun and easy decorating idea.

Yard Lights - Party Lights
Outdoor lights are wonderful for entertaining. When you have lights around your yard, it will make everyone feel welcome and make things a lot easier for evening parties. Using solar landscape lighting around the yard is also a great way to show off your newly designed landscape.
Lights used for landscaping can light up your yard and features in your landscaped area. Everyone will enjoy the beauty of looking into your backyard and everything all lit up.

Source: http://www.plant-care.com/landscape-lighting.html