About Our Landscape Lighting
Landscape lighting is the heart of what Sitellight does. It is how a property looks, feels and functions after dark: which parts of the house and garden are revealed, which are left quiet, and how you find your way from the street to the front door and from the house to the water.
Good lighting design is not about putting more light on a property. It is about putting the right amount of light in the right places, with appropriate intensity, color quality, beam control and glare control. A well-lit property often uses less light than a poorly lit one. It simply uses it better.
What a landscape lighting design covers
Architecture and façade, trees and palms, gardens and planting beds, entrances, pathways, driveways and outdoor living areas. We look at them together, because the eye does. A façade that is lit harder than the palms in front of it flattens the view; a bright path light beside a softly lit garden is all you will see.
Why the design matters more than the fixtures
Two properties can have the same fixtures and look nothing alike at night. The difference is in the decisions: a narrow beam to carry up a royal palm trunk and a wider one to open the canopy, a warmer source on stone and a cleaner one on foliage, a shielded fixture anywhere a sightline would otherwise catch the lamp.
Glare is the most common fault in outdoor lighting and the easiest to avoid at design stage. If you can see the source, you stop seeing what it lights.
Built for South Florida
Salt air, humidity, summer growth and storm season are hard on outdoor systems. We specify fixtures, connections and transformers with that in mind, and we plan for the landscape as it will be once it grows in, not only as it looks on the day of installation.
Commercial properties
The same design approach applies to restaurants, hotels, retail centers, office buildings, clubhouses and community entrances. A commercial landscape has to welcome guests, help people find their way from the parking area to the door, and present the property well after dark, without glare for pedestrians or drivers.
Where landscape lighting starts
Projects vary widely. These are the situations we are most often called about.
A new lighting design
For a property with no lighting, or a new build or new landscape where the lighting can be planned alongside everything else.
Upgrading or retrofitting an existing system
Many properties have plenty of fixtures and still look wrong at night: too bright in places, dark in others, glare from the driveway. Often the answer is a redesign or retrofit using some of what is already there.
Adding to a system over time
A property does not have to be lit all at once. A design can be built in phases and still read as one composition when it is finished.
Converting an older system
A common project is taking an older line-voltage landscape lighting system and converting it to a modern low-voltage system, redesigned around what the property looks like today.
Commercial and community properties
Hotel arrivals, restaurant and retail frontages, office entrances, clubhouses, community entrances and common areas, designed with the same attention to glare and composition as a residence.
