CURB APPEAL: ACCENTUATING YOUR HOME’S BEST FEATURES

Your home’s curb appeal, it’s attractiveness when viewed from off-property, stirs your own sense of pride but the other important audience comprises visitors, neighbors, and when the time comes, potential buyers. The excellence and the uniqueness of your home’s architectural and landscaping features attract admiration that ought not set along with the sun. Not when landscape lighting design offers such amazing opportunities to enhance and amplify the aesthetics visible by day.

This is a good place to emphasize that curb appeal isn’t necessarily limited to the qualities of the street-facing front of the house. Any parts of your house and grounds that are visible from off-property are in play.

Lighting is like dressing up to go out on the town–it’s highlighting and accentuating specific features that you’re trying to draw attention to. At the same time, unattractive features such as utility boxes and trash cans can be erased from the nighttime composition.  Uplighting can add emphasis to the house’s vertical dimension. Techniques like silhouetting and wall washing create expansiveness, grazing can deepen the textures of rough surfaces like brick and stucco. The design challenge is to layer different types of lights into a coherent whole, uniting the property’s various elements into an awesome composition. Even a modest home can be made to appear as stately and grand by night.

The value of bringing trees and shrubs to life after dark, of drawing the eye to walkways, gazebos, decks, entrances, arbors, and so forth is twofold. While owners more frequently enjoy their landscape lighting from inside the house, there’s also the natural delight taken in coming home after sundown to a one’s own beautifully illuminated house and grounds. Pride of ownership is reflected, too, in market values when the time comes to sell a property. Homes with landscape lighting attract more attention and more potential buyers than homes without it. Experienced realtors will confirm that this is especially so during the dark winter months when landscape lighting adds warmth to the impression made by a home.  

Realtors also know that the boost in curb appeal a great outdoor landscape lighting installation gives to a residence is reflected in market price.  The beauty is enhanced by the sense of safety provided by outdoor lighting, and this adds up to a desirable property. Properly designed and executed by experienced professionals,  landscape lighting’s contribution to curb appeal makes it a winning investment.