When the weather warms up, it’s time to get outside and enjoy the sunshine in your Kansas City backyard.
It’s amazing to walk around and see the landscape coming to life in spring and embrace the heat of summer after a long, cold winter. In fact, when the days get super hot, you begin to enjoy staying outdoors in the evening hours as the sun starts to dip.
This is what makes nighttime the best time to entertain. You gather with friends and family members and chit-chat, play games, have snacks, and tell jokes. These are the nights memories are made. You grill dinner in your outdoor kitchen. Take late night dips in your pool. You sit around your patio listening to the soothing sounds of a nearby water feature or the flickering light of a fire feature.
Even though summer days are nice and long, sometimes when you’re enjoying time together they never feel long enough.
When you don’t want the party to end, backyard lighting can do wonders for illuminating your space and adding extra ambiance to the scene. Not sure what to do with lighting in your landscape? Let’s review some backyard lighting ideas to inspire you.
The Many Benefits of Landscape Lighting
Backyard lighting can do so much for your landscape. In fact, you might not even realize all of the perks.
Naturally, lighting extends your enjoyment outside. This enables you to use your space longer. This one is a no-brainer.
But landscape lighting also sets a mood – an ambiance that is unique. Landscape lighting isn’t full of glaring spotlights like a parking lot; it’s made up of soft, warm lights designed to enhance your space with touches of illumination in just the right places. You can enjoy your garden from a whole different angle and viewpoint. Lighting adds a glimmer and glitz, and a sparkle and shine to those starry nights on your patio.
This additional light also brings added security to your property. There are no more pitch black corners strangers can lurk in.
Another benefit is how much you’ll end up enjoying your backyard lighting from indoors. The views out of your windows are just as magical as the views when you’re actually out there. Instead of staring at an empty black rectangle out your window, you can see your garden illuminated with a warm glow.
Lighting also elevates your overall curb appeal. When people drive past your home in the evening hours, they see the lit up architecture and entryway, as well as glowing landscape elements and pathways leading to the backyard. Your home is perceived as worth more with enhanced value when it gleams at night.
6 Backyard Lighting Ideas That Add Impact to Your Patio
When you consider landscape lighting options, many times you’ll notice a cookie-cutter package of path lights and some uplighting for your home. This is a standard package that many people offer or you might even try to do yourself.
And while this idea is fine and can get you some light, it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to truly great backyard lighting ideas.
Try these amazing ideas for lighting up your patio and backyard retreat.
Backyard Lighting Idea #1: Fire Torches
A whimsical fire pit garden can also be adorned with fire torches reminiscent of tiki torches.
This often-overlooked backyard lighting idea can be a great choice for easy setup wherever you need them, depending on your prime entertainment area.
Tiki torches can add a tall, elegant presentation to your outdoor enjoyment.
Backyard Lighting Idea #2: Pendant Lights
Switch up your backyard lighting by adding hanging lights over your space for a magical, mystical touch.
Pendant lights can hang in a row to evenly distribute light over your patio. They can also hang from tree branches, transforming a dark, boring area into one perfect for barbecues, get-togethers, or garden parties.
You can even have pendant lights hanging down from a pavilion.
With pendant lights, a professional installation can make all the difference because you don’t want lights that hang too low and get in the way of your guests, and you don’t want lights that are put up too high and won’t illuminate your area properly.
And depending on your personal style, pendant lights can also add a design element to your backyard. You can choose square, round, or lantern-like light shapes hanging from cords, rods, or chains.
These subtle, hanging lights around a patio are part of an easy and elegant solution to create beautiful, natural downlighting.
Backyard Lighting Idea #3: Hardscape Lighting
Installing lights into stones, retaining wall pavers, or deck steps can be hidden illumination that does so much for your backyard lighting scheme.
Installed flush with the hardscape material, these lights shine an inconspicuous beam on the entire surface, enhancing safety and eliminating trip hazards, as well as boosting overall ambiance.
These lights can also create a visible boundary on the deck or patio area to highlight its shape and your primary entertainment space.
These tucked-away lights can be especially helpful installed on steps to make them easy to navigate during day and night. As subtle lights, they are a great solution for gracefully lighting your step treads and risers, retaining and seat walls, and accent columns.
Backyard Lighting Idea #4: Pathway Lighting
Path lighting is a critical part of backyard lighting because it helps guide you, your family members, and your visitors from one place to another place in your Kansas City garden. This could be movement from the outdoor kitchen to the patio, transporting food around, for instance. Or this could be guiding folks from the patio to the pool area, making taking a dip and then drying off convenient.
When lighting paths, it’s vital that you don’t have a runway effect in your landscape. You want a consistent stream of illumination that comes from staggered lights placed inconspicuously on both sides of your path. This ensures balanced light where no one is blinded, but everyone can simply see what’s going on.
Backyard Lighting Idea #5: Highlight Garden Features
You might have some really great trees with twisting branches, a decorative water feature or fountain, a cool retaining wall, or a unique sculpture.
During the day, these architectural or landscape features are some of your favorite elements in your backyard. But once the sun dips below the horizon, they disappear from sight.
Landscape lighting enables you to see them again in a whole new light (pun intended). They can also create great attention grabbers or focal points in your space, which can make amazing conversation starters.
Backyard Lighting Idea #6: Moon Lighting
No one wants to spotlight a space with harsh light that shines in people’s faces or creates glare and weird shadows.
Moonlighting, however, is a way to create that overhead light that gently shines down and is reminiscent of the soft glow the moon provides in your outdoor space on a clear night.
With this backyard lighting strategy, you place lights high in trees or structures to cast light down that mimics the gentle silvery essence from the moon. Moonlighting enhances your property’s natural beauty without blinding you or irritating your neighbors.
Ready to Bring Light to Your Favorite Backyard Spaces?
You’ve done your best to make your Kansas City backyard look first-rate. You don’t want your investment to disappear come nightfall.
We hope these backyard lighting ideas enable you to eliminate that darkness and put your favorite backyard landscape elements on display.
When you look at all of the unique ideas you can find by conducting a Google search, you will likely find endless photos of amazing and intricate landscape lighting designs. In fact, the many ideas you find – from fixtures to designs to wiring and where to place lights – can feel overwhelming. Don’t fret. Let High Prairie Outdoors Take that worry off of your plate. We are experts at installing high-end landscape lighting in Kansas City area homes and can give your backyard just the right amount of glamor and glow that fits into your unique yard and budget.
Ready to see how High Prairie Outdoors can enhance your backyard entertainment areas with landscape lighting? We’d love to share our design and installation expertise with you and deliver an elevated outdoor experience. Get started today with a free consultation. Together, we can create a solution that works best for you.
