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Design insights

Ten tips for lighting landscapes

From parks to gardens, the principles are the same, Mary Rushton-Beales reveals.

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Use natural shapes

All the rules of exterior architectural lighting apply but with the additional need to exploit or enhance natural shapes and contours, especially through the use of shadows. As ever, the watchword is subtlety.

Make use of walls

Vertical surfaces are the lighting designer’s and the landscape architect’s friend. Grazing or washing hard and soft surfaces can be both effective and gentle ways to create ambient light.

Use colour temperature carefully

Colour temperature helps set the atmosphere but that does not necessarily mean that you have to use warm light in gardens and parks. Diffuse, cold light coming through trees and bushes like moonlight may feel more natural and comfortable than warm light that evokes subconscious images of embers and flames.

Use light as a guide

Lighting has a particularly important role in way-finding in outdoor spaces. Techniques such as silhouetting and spotlighting can be used to orientate as well as to draw the eye to features such as planting or sculptures.

Match plants and lighting

It is essential to coordinate planting and lighting. If the contrast in lighting levels between a pathway and its borders is too great, the effect can be threatening, Dispersed lighting can be very effective on shrubbery. Edge lighting and other forms of low level lighting such as bollards have a role to play here.

Think day and night

At night the use of open spaces may change, and with it the viewpoint that the lighting has to serve. For example a garden that is well used in the day but empty at night may still be overlooked, in which case low-level lighting may be very effective, particularly where there is water.

Reflect on water

Water, of course provides endless opportunities for lighting, with movement and reflections.

Design for distance

One key difference between landscape lighting and most architectural lighting is the distance over which lighting effects can be seen. Schemes on green field sites are often viewed from long distances and even miniscule lumen outputs no greater than a candle’s create impact.

Don’t pollute with light

Up-lighting can be problematic  in terms of light spill and light pollution, which clearly have to be controlled carefully. Light spill into neighbouring areas is not only bad design but also illegal.

Design in context

All exterior lighting design needs to be balanced with the back ground light of the existing environment.

News

  • Industry professional on MA Course
  • Build Back Better judge
  • Suffering from S.A.D?
  • Is blue light bad for our children?
  • Residential lighting
  • Lighting rocks
  • Interior lighting
  • IALD Light night
  • Interior lighting: floor up or ceiling down?
  • Eight tips for home lighting

Industry professional on MA Course

“Totally honoured to be among the industry professionals involved in the online MA Interior Design for the Health and Wellbeing course at New Bucks University” Mary Rushton-Beales

Build Back Better judge

“So excited to be a judge on the Build Back Better Awards.” Mary Rushton-Beales Lighting Design House

Suffering from S.A.D?

Recently I have had occasion to look at 3 individuals’ home-working environments, who all suffer from S.A.D. This led me to reprise a vein of enquiry via NHS Health A-Z which really annoyed me…

Is blue light bad for your child? Article by Mary Rushton-Beale

Is blue light bad for our children?

I wonder if one day we will talk about the time when we spent hours without respite looking at a cool white screen, in the same way as we talk about how doctors used to promote cigarettes? Mary Rushton-Beales

Residential lighting

…the lighting in your home
needs to adapt to many different moods, ambient and functional

Lighting rocks

‘I’ve been designing the lit environment for more than 30 years and I suppose it’s quite appropriate that this was my most difficult lighting challenge ever’ Mary Rushton-Beales

Interior lighting

… fine-tuned for the space and its function but, above all, for people

IALD

IALD Light night

IALD Light night, an evening of film 15 March, 6.30 start Avatar Presented by Mary Rushton Beale Full details IALD Film Night

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