Outdoor Accent Lighting Fixtures

Outdoor accent lights can magnify any structure or exterior landscape element with supplemental white light or subtle shades of primary colors. Outdoor accent lighting fixtures are often much smaller and less obtrusive than standard site lights, and most are low voltage fixtures intended to remain on throughout the night without costing your client a fortune in electrical usage. There are hundreds of accent lights you can use for outdoor decor, and countless places throughout your client's property where they can be installed.

Accent Building Lighting

Most commercial buildings have something unique about their architecture that you can capitalize upon to differentiate them from surrounding buildings. Accenting these structural points of differentiation can be done very effectively with decorative light fixtures made specifically for building and sign lighting.

Even if your client has a relatively ordinary building with no distinguishing features, so to speak, you can still add an aesthetic touch to the structures with LED accent lights and sign lights. Just by adding a bit of color to a drab exterior can transform a building from something that is "just there" to something that stands out in an appealing manner.

Walkway & Path Commercial Lighting Fixtures

Any corporation, academic institution, or municipal facility that has more than one building on site is going to have connecting walkways that run between these buildings. These walkways can be illuminated with a variety of outdoor accent lighting fixtures, most of which are low voltage fixtures and diminutive in size. Bollards, path lights, and rope lights are excellent sources to use along walkways. During holidays, a host of LED specialty lights and displays can also be installed along walkways to establish a theme of decorum appropriate to the season.

Ultimately, no matter what lamp options you select for your client's outdoor accent lighting, you should aim to create a sense of unity between the architecture of different buildings-especially if the buildings themselves differ significantly from one another. If your clients building(s) reside(s) on several acres of property, you also have to extend this sense of unity into the surrounding landscape. As sustainability and green technology continue to matter more and more to society at large, your clients can surely benefit from the implication that their facility is so environmentally friendly it looks like a feature of the land itself.

Tree Lighting Fixtures

Tree lights represent a very unique, niche market product for eclectic landscape design companies. For regions of the country where they are still legal to use, mercury vapor decorative lights can be hidden in the upper branches of the trees to create pools of artificial moonlight around the base of the trunk. For areas where mercury lights have been banned, contractors can install fluorescent or LED fixtures to create special luminary effects in the landscape.

Waterworks

Municipal parks and large commercial properties frequently invest enormous sums of money in fountains and artificial waterfalls that need elegant lighting. These waterworks can be either circular or rectangular in nature and often have a concrete bottom similar to a swimming pool. When you encounter a structure such as this, you have an amazing opportunity to produce some spectacular lighting effects with energy saving lights that will magnify the brilliance of the fountain and surrounding pool at a marginal power cost.

Commercial accent lighting around waterworks can be ambient white light, colored light, or a blend of both. LEDs make excellent sources for this type of accent lighting because many LEDs can actually be installed under the surface of the water. You can install red, green, amber, or blue LEDs in key locations along the bottom of the pool, fountain, or artificial waterfall, creating a spectrum of light that rises out of the water. Around the perimeter you can use decorative bollards, step lights, accent lights, and small floodlights that shine white light toward the center of the pool and the waterspout of the fountain itself.

These fixtures too may be very energy efficient, featuring low voltage halogen, commercial fluorescents, or white LEDs.

Statues and Metal Sculptures

Statuary is common on public school campuses, colleges, and universities. Statures are almost always present in the courtyard of city government buildings and frequently decorate public recreation and park areas as well. Decorative lights around statues should be as low key and unobtrusive as possible. Commercial decorative lights mounted in the ground around statues or on the corners of the pedestal can create stunning up lighting effects. However, you do not want to light the entire surface of the statue when doing this. If you do, you will "flatten" the statue's appearance to a two dimensional image. A certain amount of shadow is essential to giving a statue a sense of depth and proportion. Commercial decorative lights must be positioned at key angles of incidence to create this blend of light and shadow.

Similar principals apply to lighting metal sculptures with decorative lighting fixtures, although there is often much greater flexibility here if you are lighting something that is very large and asymmetrical in design. Large metal sculptures often require decorative lights to be directly mounted to their in order to evenly illuminate the curves and angles of the piece.