The Benefits Of Landscape Lighting & Garden Lights In Houston Pt 2

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Top 5 Reasons To Install Houston Landscape Lighting & Use Garden Lights

Part 2

3. Enhance Your Property’s Curb Appeal

Believe it or not, something as simple as outdoor lighting can help to enhance your property’s curb appeal and its overall value. After all, a home that looks appealing will be perceived to be worth more. Thus, it can present a good return on your investment beyond the other benefits you can get from it. In fact, according to the National Association of Home Builders, as many as 41 percent of prospective buyers categorize outdoor lighting as an essential quality for their future home. Likewise, 49 percent of prospective home buyers rated it as something that is a desirable quality for their future home. By using strategy and placing the lights around your yard, you should be able to boost the aesthetics of your home by a significant amount. A lot of designers use specific techniques like the moonlight effect which uses soft ‘moon-like’ lighting to illuminate the space without being too harsh.

4. Enhance The Safety Of Your Property

Outdoor lighting is not only beautiful and good for the curb appeal of your home, but it can even improve the safety of your home. After all, it can help to illuminate walkways making it much easier to get around your property without tripping in the dark. Likewise, it can help to minimize the chances you have others like delivery people getting hurt while on your property. With proper use of outdoor lighting, you can keep your family much safer while enjoying the yard when it’s dark outside.

5. Deter Crime

Another major benefit that can come from adding lighting to your home has to be its ability to deter crime. In fact, according to a lot of sources, one of the most common threats to your home is a burglary. These occur as much as every 13 seconds in the United States. By using floodlights, you can brighten up the area surrounding your property. Not only will this make any guests you are entertaining much more comfortable to be around your property, but it can deter trespassing. It can even decrease the attractiveness of your home to prospective burglars since your home will be adequately lit. If you don’t want your home to be constantly lit due to fears of having sky-high utility bills, you can use lights that have built-in motion sensors so they only get triggered when they detect motion. You will even be able to get outdoor lights with timer functionality which can help disguise your absence when on vacation.

Hire A Professional!

If you want to begin a brand new landscape lighting project to enhance your home for these reasons, you will want to hire a professional. There are so many benefits of investing in outdoor lighting as it can provide a quick and immediate return on investment through boosting your home’s curb appeal and by providing your family with all kinds of other benefits. If you are looking to get started with highlighting your home’s beautiful lawn, garden, and other features with outdoor lighting in the Greater Houston area, call us today! We are awaiting your call to provide you with ideas on how we can help along with a completely free estimate to get started. Missed the first issue of this article? Click here!

The Benefits Of Landscape Lighting & Garden Lights In Houston Pt 1

Posted by Robert Huff on

Top 5 Reasons To Install Houston Landscape Lighting & Use Garden Lights

Part 1

Your home is something that you take pride in maintaining. While you may think your work is done after you’ve planted all of your flower beds and laid down your lawn, there is much more to do. One of the best ways to enhance the overall look and feel of your yard is by adding landscape lighting and garden lights. Doing these things can help you make your home feel much safer, as well. You should be looking to consider adding outdoor lighting to your next landscaping project to get your yard feeling cozy and looking beautiful. Below, you will find some of the greatest benefits of investing in professional landscape lighting.

Here are some of the best benefits of adding professional landscape lighting:

1. Illuminate Your Space

Believe it or not, but your living room doesn’t have to be the space in and around your home where you spend all of your time. You can spend a lot of time outdoors with your friends and family with an ideal setup. Your patio and your backyard present plenty of space which makes it an optimal space to host guests, barbecues, and spend more time with your kids outdoors. Adding more professional outdoor lighting can illuminate your patio and yard no matter if you are looking to enjoy the sunshine with your kids or read a book underneath the moonlight. There are even outdoor lights that you can install that have a dim feature allowing you to adjust the level of practical lighting whether you need it for playing with your kids at night or if you are looking to enjoy a glass of wine in a romantic setting. You will find these lights available in all kinds of different designs and even shapes. Therefore, you should be able to find the right set of lights that can accentuate your outdoor space properly.

2. Highlight Your Decor

By utilizing the right outdoor lighting throughout your patio and yard, you will be able to leverage the lighting to highlight a lot of the features that your yard has. You can do things like guide visitors to your front door or even light up the walkways to enhance safety. You will even be able to utilize this type of lighting to illuminate your property lines to ensure people know where your property ends. These lights can be a great way to showcase your yard and display it in its ‘best light.’ You can strategically place all of your lights around the features you want to highlight whether it’s a water fountain or a specific bush or tree.

For instance, by using these lights in and around your flower beds, you should be able to showcase the beauty of the flowers which can improve the aesthetics of your garden even at night. You can even utilize overhead lighting for porches or incorporate them on staircases. You can even use statement lights which can help you create the right mood or even themed lights if you are looking to accentuate your beachfront property.

If you would like to discover more tips and tricks from Robert Huff Illuminations; visit our blog. Call or contact us today if you need a professional lighting designer for your outdoor lighting design. Please click here for the rest of this article.

Why You Should Get A Houston Landscape Lighting

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Amazing Benefits Of Landscape Lighting Services In Houston

There are numerous benefits of installing or even improving your current landscape lighting. Some of these include making your home more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, increasing safety, and even increasing the property value.

By installing outdoor lights, you can actually make your home look more beautiful by simply highlighting certain features. Strategically placing these lights will make your home look its best that it can improve its curb appeal. This certainly adds a great deal of value and security which means you’ll get a good ROI from installing landscape lights.

We will now look at some specific benefits of landscape lighting that should help you understand why they’re so important.

1. Visually Appealing

Landscape lighting can create a very beautiful home as it accentuates your home’s best features. For example, if you have just put in a new door but the beauty can’t be seen in the day, then you can use lights to accentuate it in the night. By strategically using lights, you can highlight all of the architectural details that were not noticed before.

You can even use lights to highlight trees and plants in your yard. Downlights and other lights can be used to highlight garden walls or even make them the focal point. You can also use floodlights which actually help to fill up space and give it more interest and texture.

2. Offers Security

Dark homes are quite attractive to burglars since they can easily move and hide in the dark. However, by having landscape lighting, this will certainly help to reduce the likelihood that a burglar would attempt to get into your home. Even if they did, they would be easily seen. Also, by having lighting outside, it would be very beneficial to you and your family since you would be able to easily move around your home at night and detect any intruders very easily.

3. Safety

Next, landscape lighting will not only help you to easily move around your home at night but also help your guests do the same. This is great when you have guests over or even have a house party. Night activities can be quite dangerous without adequate lighting and you may be liable for any accidents or damages that happen in your home. So, by having good lighting in your yard, this will help prevent any of the accidents from occurring.

4. Increases Property Value

Lastly, it doesn’t matter what type of home you have, once you install landscape lighting, it will enhance your property and add a great deal of style. So, even if you have a small or modest home, you can use lighting to highlight its best features and make it a lot more engaging than before. This would result in your home being even more beautiful and it would also increase its overall value. This is definitely a huge advantage if you plan on selling your home in the future since a well-lit property is a lot more appealing to buyers. As a result, installing landscape lighting is a very sound financial decision.

Give us a call or contact us today if you need help with your landscape lighting and for more pieces of information! Please feel free to visit our blog for more related topics and articles.

Lighting Designers In Houston: Why They Are Badly Needed? Part 2

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The Cost & Payback Of A Skilled Lighting Services In Houston

As a profession, architectural lighting design has proven to be successful due to the numerous solid answers to this particular question: Why would an owner or architect pay to get lighting design services whereas it can be done by a salesperson or in the house at no extra cost? The charge fee for a lighting designer is tough to justify when the value and extent of the services rendered aren’t recognized. However, those architects and owners who have gained from independent and skillful lighting design understand there are short and long-term paybacks outweighing the fee. Lighting designers can be a value-added and unique resource. In most cases, a lighting designer will minimize project construction and operation cost. Here are some instances where this is demonstrated repeatedly.

1. Equipment Cost Control

Lighting designers can give a design meeting a set budget but will be more useful when planning the budget. They will choose equipment from various manufacturers to assist in keeping bids competitive and make recommendations on lighting techniques or equipment to help in reducing installation costs. Their presence will only encourage competition. But some lighting fixtures are ‘one of a kind’ in which case the price can be acquired directly from the manufacturer. To identify gross anomalies, the unit pricing obtained during the design development can be compared to the unit pricing the bidding contractors give. The design might also recommend distributors for them to get additional competitive bids. Lastly, the lighting designer will work alongside the owner’s representative and contractor(s) to attain budget goals without sacrificing the design.

2. Operations Cost Control

Minimizing the operations costs the owner may prove to be an integral part of design decisions with such measures benefitting the project practically and aesthetically. Lifecycle cost evaluation compares the Return On Initial Investment of different technologies or techniques. Usually, costs can be mitigated if the space isn’t over-lighted. Over-lighting can occur if the specifier utilizes rote horizontal footcandle prescriptions or does not understand visuals and task issues of the project. Many a time, the specifier is dependent on recommendations from the equipment’s salespersons. There are hundreds of ways a pro designer can minimize costs and improve the project in general. Enhancing the reflectance of surfaces can assist in reducing operating costs and lighting equipment. Selective spotlighting is essential to retail sales. Incorporating daylight with electric lighting will save on energy and offer a satisfying connection to the world.

3. People Costs

Light quality impacts people on a variety of levels. New studies suggest that lighting affects safety and security, retail sales, wayfinding, and the productivity of employees. Professional lighting designers are conversant with such issues and the methods needed to achieve those results. The cost incurred for poor lighting that just meets the standard code simply isn’t worth it in locations where the ‘people factor’ is key.

4. Aesthetic Costs

Skills can easily be acquired and learned, whereas talent cannot. Architects are fully aware of how the value-adder for creative and brilliant design is challenging to evaluate and is contingent on the decision-maker’s appreciation. Bu the difference a sufficing lighting design and another that brings the architecture to its realization is more or less felt.

If you would like to discover more tips and tricks from Robert Huff Illuminations; visit our blog. Call or contact us today if you need a professional lighting designer with your outdoor lighting design. Missed the first issue of this article? Click here!

Lighting Designers In Houston: Why They Are Badly Needed? Part 1

Posted by Robert Huff on

Knowing Why A Diligent Houston Lighting Designer Is So Essential

When drafting a new project, there are some basic questions that you need to consider and answer, specifically: Is illumination essential to your project? What is defined as good lighting design, and how can it be realized?

Lighting is a technically challenging but astonishing medium that needs mastery of varying and continually evolving disciplines. A lighting design combines the sciences, arts, and illumination business design and implementation far beyond the concerns of horizontal footcandles and visibility.

Lighting designers are part and parcel of the design team and, just like the architects, charge you for services delivered. Expert lighting designers bring to the table solid technical ingenuity and sensitive design methods to landscape and architectural projects. However, the value-added services they offer can make or break the project’s success and, thus, hugely outweigh the impact of their service fee.

A project designer or owner might be oblivious of the benefits an independent lighting consultant has to offer in today’s construction and design processes. For instance: what’s the difference between services delivered by a lighting professional compared to that of an interior designer or electrical engineer? The interior designer’s responsibility was selecting decorative lighting equipment while the electrical engineer was tasked with the lighting since it’s part of the electrical grid. Right? So what has created a profession that solely specializes in the lighting?

1. Technology

Lighting control technologies and equipment are developing at a break-neck speed with hundreds of products getting introduced to the market every year. Lighting professionals should consider attending national trade shows and continuously update product info and samples from various manufacturers. That is if they want to deliver proper design solutions that utilize the newest and most cost-effective technologies. Staying updated with the latest weapons in the lighting armory is time-intensive but has never been more essential. Note that independent lighting consultants don’t install or sell equipment, nor are they dependent on recommendations done by lighting salespersons. Therefore, the client will receive a lighting design based on expertise and research – free from any conflict of interest.

2. Technique

Illumination is architecture’s transient partner. The light remains invisible until it strikes a surface or object. Controlling this difficult, ephemeral medium gives the lighting designer the chance to make dynamics, hierarchies, and mood. Lighting design is a creative extension of the architecture, enhancing visibility and complementing program, form, and color. Talent, coupled together with experience, creates illumination patterns that will support the overall project goals seamlessly.

3. Education

Knowledge of electricity, construction, optics, codes, physics, ergonomics, vision, business, the art of design, and construction are all integral to creating impressive lighting solutions. To deliver the best possible services, lighting pros must generally be well-grounded individuals who constantly educate themselves. They can do this in a variety of ways, including reading journals and trade magazines, networking, attending and presenting seminars. This give-and-take scenario, alongside healthy competition, boosts the profession forward as a whole.

If you would like to discover more tips and tricks from Robert Huff Illuminations; visit our blog. Call or contact us today if you need a professional lighting designer with your outdoor lighting design. For the rest of this article please click here.

A Guide For Hiring A Houston Landscape Lighting Expert

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Things To Consider When Looking For A Landscape Lighting Professional In Houston

You have taken care of everything to ensure your home and landscape look their best. All that is left is the outdoor lighting that will illuminate and accentuate your landscape while providing some extra security. Working with a landscape lighting expert is recommended, but you need to choose the right expert to help you decide on your needs, budget and lighting desires. Before you start looking for an expert, there are some questions you need to ask yourself.

What Is The Purpose Of Having Outdoor Lighting Installed?

Think about the sole purpose of having the lighting. You might be looking to update the landscape or enhance a special feature. You may want to add security to your landscape along the paths and patio.

What Is Your Budget?

The budget is very important when it comes to landscape lighting. However, you will want to get the best for your purpose. Some companies have very affordable options on the market, but they will not always be the best quality.

What Look Are You Aiming For?

Do you want to illuminate the entrance to your home with pathway lights or do you want some LED lights for trees and bushes? There may be another purpose for the lighting that will help you determine what you want and need from your lights.

The Purposes Of Outdoor Lighting

There are a lot of reasons why you will want to install outdoor lighting. If you have a commercial property, you might need them for added security. Landscape lighting can deter potential criminal activity around your business. If you travel often for business, the lighting can also increase the safety for when you return.

While the location is often the most important aspect of real estate, landscape lighting can help with curb appeal. If you have a beautiful landscape you have spent a lot of time on, you will want to highlight it with low-voltage LED lights. If you have a water feature, you can use reflecting pool lights to make it stand out. The lighting can also be practical as you illuminate stairs leading to our home.

Water feature lighting is not restricted to fountains as pools and ponds can also benefit from the right lighting. An outdoor lighting expert will be able to design and install lighting that enhances the water feature without being too harsh. Creating a soft glow around the water feature can create a different atmosphere to space and invite you to spend more time outside.

The most practical purpose of outdoor lighting is to illuminate a pathway. When you are coming home or if you have guests over, you want them to be safe as they move around the house. Pathway lighting is the best way to ensure this as the lights guide people toward the house and you never have to worry about someone slipping on a paving stone because they did not see it correctly.

What To Look For In A Landscape Lighting Expert

Once you have considered your lighting needs, you need to look for a lighting expert to help you. As you will not buy a home without some research, you should not hire a lighting expert without doing your homework. The expert should not only have experience installing light fixtures, but they also need to know how to make them look good. Experts need to have knowledge of design and understand how lighting can provide the security you want.

When you research the experts in your area, you should consider the warranty offered on the lights they install. This will be the warranty offered on their work and not the manufacturer’s warranty. Any reputable expert will offer a prolonged or lifetime warranty on their work.

The expert should also be willing to work with you from the design phase to beyond the end of the project. They will want your home to look as beautiful as you have envisioned it. They also want to highlight all the hard work you have done to get your landscape looking its best.

While it is important that the expert and their team are skilled, they should also be creative in their design for your property. To determine their creativity, you should look at past work they have done. A creative approach can completely change the lighting design.

You also need to see how well they know their products and what to look for when installing outdoor lighting. They should consider light pollution and detail the steps they can take to reduce this. They should also understand what lighting works best with the plants you have as well as the features in your landscape.

When looking at their experience, you should try to find out how many commercial and residential landscapes they have worked on. Their website should provide you with some of this information and testimonials from past clients. The website also needs to detail the services that they offer.

The last step you should take when choosing an expert is to talk to people who have worked with them. People who have good experiences will be more likely to refer the company to people they know. Getting recommendations from friends and family is a good start, but you can also look online for reviews. Many experts have a list of references who you can contact, but they are unlikely to have any issues with the service provided.

If you want to spend more time in the outside space of your home, you need to look at hiring a landscape lighting expert. They can also help with the lighting around commercial properties. The expert should ask you about the purpose of the lighting or help you work through everything to determine your needs. Before you hire anyone, you should research them and consider an appointment to get to know them better.

If you would like to discover more tips and tricks from Robert Huff Illuminations; visit our blog. Call or contact us today for more information!

two story house with moonlighting

When To Hire A Lighting Professional In Houston

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Reasons To Hire A Houston Lighting Expert

In case you are looking to design or redo your home’s lighting, then you might be considering to do this as a Do-It-Yourself project. But the most effective way of ensuring that your home’s lighting is done properly and correctly is hiring a lighting expert. Even though most people believe that hiring a lighting professional is a costly option, doing so can, in fact, save you a lot of time, money and effort as your project benefits from their skills and expertise.

Technology

One of the main reasons to hire a lighting professional is that they have knowledge of the different types of lighting technology. You have to keep in mind that there are various kinds of lights and lighting solutions available on the market. A lighting professional will help you choose the best and most cost-effective lighting solution.

Skills

Lighting work requires a specific set of skills and the required knowledge. Since lighting professionals are well trained and educated about lighting including the art of design, environmental issues, codes, electricity, optics, and more.

Options

Another benefit of lighting professionals is that they know and are well-updated on the different lighting solutions out there. A lighting professional gives you access to a wide range of options and helps you to choose the best one for your home.

Savings

It is easy to assume that a lighting project will increase your project costs. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. A lighting professional knows the most cost-effective techniques, knows how to find fixtures that are less costly, helps you to avoid making expensive errors, and helps you to stick to your budget, which helps to save you a lot of money.

Factors To Take Into Consideration

Size

One of the main factors to consider when deciding between hiring a lighting professional or doing it yourself is the scope of the design. If your project is large, for example, a new home lighting design project, then you should definitely hire a professional.

Budget

Your budget is always an important factor to consider when making this type of decision. As discussed earlier, a lighting professional can help you to save money. So, compare the quotes from different professionals first.

Skills

Another important factor to consider is your skill level and experience. If you have relevant experience in lighting design, then you can consider DIY. However, hire a professional if you have little to no experience with home lighting.

Choosing A Lighting Professional

If you are planning a home lighting design project, you obviously want to leave the task to someone who knows what they are doing. Therefore, it is crucial to find out whether he or she has professional qualifications. Start by finding out whether he or she is a member of the International Association of Lighting Designers. Also, find out if he or she has a CLC (Certified Lighting Consultant) or LC (Lighting Certification). Lastly, find out about his or her past lighting education and participation in any lighting design awards programs.

If you would like to discover more tips and tricks from Robert Huff Outdoor Lighting; visit our blog. Call or contact us today for more information!