If you love to entertain, you know the importance of the right types of outdoor lighting to set the mood and create a pleasant cooking, dining, and lounging experiences. If you’re looking to create a more elegant and dramatic entertaining atmosphere, here are 7 glamorous outdoor lighting ideas for the avid entertainer in Buffalo Grove and Highland Park, IL, areas.
Related: Sleek Modern Outdoor Lighting Ideas For Your Outdoor Kitchen In Glenview IL
The best results will come from illuminating the area without overly bright, blinding lights that cast harsh shadows and ruin a pleasing ambience. The secret is using a combination of lighting techniques. This way you’ll get the security and practicality you need, and the ambience you want.
1. Backsplash-mounted lighting
By far the most important lighting for entertaining is task lighting and ambient lighting - but don’t let practicality be the only consideration: you can create drama with the following techniques.
Install task lighting that is mounted on the backsplash of your outdoor kitchen. This will actually create softer lighting overall than overhead lighting and casts no shadows while providing plenty of light for chopping veggies and assembling burgers.
2. Fire
While not exactly a landscape lighting technique, the light provided by a fire does contribute to drama. Sconces and fire bowl are two ways to illuminate a space dramatically using fire. Pillar-mounted fire bowls can create a spectacular entry onto a patio. Sconces along a tall retaining wall cast reflections of the mesmerizing dance of flames. For the most jaw-dropping effects, combine water and fire, such as a pillar-mounted bowl fountain topped with fire.
You can achieve dramatic lighting in your dining area with a fire table, which offers the warm glow of a fire in either a coffee table height, dining table height, or bar height.
3. Light fixtures built into walls
Achieve a glamorous feel by using light fixtures that are integrated under the capstone of any vertical masonry feature such as a seat wall, retaining wall, or pillar. These light fixtures are unobtrusive during daylight hours, and seem to magically illuminate vertical surfaces after dark, drawing attention to the walls’ textures. The richness of the textures adds incredible character to an outdoor living space.
4. Spotlighting
Accent lighting is where you can express your artistic side and bring glamour to your patio. Spotlighting positions fixtures adjacent to vertical surfaces will create an interesting play of shadows on retaining walls, the home’s siding, trees, or fountains. These fixtures can be oriented to shine upward to highlight, for example, a tree’s bark and canopy; or downward, to highlight interesting plantings.
5. Submersible lighting
Submersible lights turn any fountain, reflecting pool, pond, or waterfall into a magical night time display. Experiment with different colored accent lights in and around water features so you can change the mood on a whim. Water jets can be illuminated such that the water appears to be immovable glass, hanging suspended in the air.
6. Moonlighting
What’s more romantic than an evening stroll under the soft glow of moonlight? Recreate the look with moonlighting - a technique that places whitish-blue tinted fixtures high in tree canopies so that the light filters softly through the foliage and creates a gorgeous dappled effect on the ground below.
7. Silhouetting
Use this technique to create dramatic silhouettes of trees or sculptures. Shine a light at an angle from the front of an object. It will be silhouetted on a vertical surface behind it.
Related: 9 Outdoor Lighting Options For Poolsides In Buffalo Grove, IL
