Commercial Outdoor Lighting Design and Installation

Lighting does three jobs at once

Commercial landscape lighting is usually justified on one of three grounds, and the best schemes serve all three.

Safety is the first and easiest to fund. Steps, level changes, and the route from parking to a door all need enough light for people to see where they are walking. This is a liability question as much as a comfort one.

Security is the second. Even lighting without dark pockets makes a property feel safer and works with cameras, which need light to be worth anything.

Appearance is the third. For half the year a significant share of arrivals happen after dark, and a landscape with no lighting simply does not exist during those hours.

A scheme designed for all three tends to be better than one designed for any single one, particularly than one designed purely for effect.

Details that separate good lighting from glare

The most common fault in commercial lighting is too much light aimed badly, which produces glare, dark shadows, and complaints from anyone whose window it reaches.

Shielding matters more than output. A shielded fixture puts light on the ground where it is needed rather than into eyes and windows. Unshielded fixtures produce glare that makes the area beyond them harder to see, not easier.

Colour temperature affects how a property reads at night. Warmer light flatters planting and buildings. Very cool light reads as institutional and makes planting look grey.

Uniformity beats brightness. A moderately lit area with even coverage feels safer than a brightly lit one with dark gaps between pools of light, because the eye adjusts to the bright areas and cannot see into the dark ones.

Installing it so it survives

Landscape lighting on commercial property has to survive maintenance equipment, irrigation, and time, and most failures trace back to installation.

Fixture placement is the first issue. A fixture in the middle of a turf area will be hit by a mower. A fixture at the base of a shrub will be inside that shrub in two years and lighting the underside of its own foliage.

Wiring depth and protection is second. Cable at insufficient depth gets cut by anyone planting, edging, or trenching, and the fault is then somewhere along a long run with no record of where it goes.

As with irrigation, the most valuable deliverable at handover is a drawing showing what was installed and where the cable runs. It costs almost nothing at the time and is impossible to reconstruct later.