Top 10 Landscape Lighting Tips for Businesses

As a business owner, you want your business to stand out among your competitors. This is applicable when talking about your products and services, your customer service and even your overall brand. But it can also apply to the physical aesthetics of your business and its location, and this is where a beautiful outdoor and landscape lighting design can really help.

If you think a landscape lighting design can only be used to illuminate your backyard or highlight the great architectural features of your home, think again. Outdoor or landscape lighting designs can also be used to enhance the character and beauty of your commercial property, and make your business a charming place that customers will want to keep coming back to.

To help you create the best lighting design for your business, our experienced team of lighting professionals have put together a list of our top 10 landscape lighting tips for businesses.

The Benefits of Outdoor Lighting for Businesses

Landscape Lighting does a lot more than just light the way to the front door. It provides first impressions, safety, and sophistication. It allows your staff and patrons alike safe access to your property in an aesthetically pleasing way, while also increasing your curb appeal! Professional Landscape lighting can also save you money, and increase your sales!

Show Off Your Location

You are proud of your business. Don’t let it hide in the dark while you’re not there. Landscape lighting makes it possible to show off your building in a sophisticated, never tacky way. First impressions are crucial when it comes to running a business. Make sure that your clients see you with your best foot forward. While many businesses, such as office buildings or golf courses, are not open at night, they still need proper illumination.

For those businesses that do stay open into the night, for example restaurants, concert venues, bars, grocery stores, and more, staying adequately and attractively lit is crucial for business. Commercial landscape lighting allows you to set the mood before your patrons even walk through the front door. This is especially important for restaurants, bars, and concert venues where the right ambience can translate into fantastic sales figures.

Increase Curb Appeal

When it comes to property value, curb appeal is incredibly important. Your commercial location may look fantastic during the day, but have you thought about what it looks like at night? Dynamic landscape lighting can be customized to show off your business’ unique architecture, feature landscaping and flowerbeds, or illuminate your company sign. These elements will go a long way to giving your business with a professional, cohesive look all day long.

Keep Your Staff and Patrons Safe

Canadian winters can be long and cold. For a few months a year, chances are, your staff will be leaving the building once the sun has set. Keep them safe on their way home with attractive landscape lighting. Properly lit commercial locations reduce theft and deter criminal activity, keeping both your staff and their belonging safe while on the premises. Safely illuminating parking lots, walkways, or entrance areas that require keys or swipe cards will increase your staff’s feeling of safety.

Lower Insurance Premiums

Any injuries that take place on your commercial property are bad for business, not to mention for the wellbeing of your staff and patrons. Providing adequate light throughout your location is one way you can prevent injuries. As an employer it is your job to make sure that walkways, steps, staircases, doorways, and traffic areas are well lit.

Your commercial insurance premiums are based on many factors. One of which is the safety of your location. Make sure it is as safe as possible with plenty of light in the areas that need it most. To find out how to lower your insurance premiums, speak to your insurance agent about landscape lighting.

Basic Fundamentals for Your Commercial Lighting System

When it comes to designing a commercial outdoor lighting system, it’s important that you focus on some fundamentals. When evaluating the safety and security of a commercial landscape lighting installation, we recommend that you focus on five basic considerations:

• The intensity of the light – how bright should it be to increase the property’s security and enhance the aesthetic of the storefront and/or grounds?
• The uniformity of the light – is the lighting consistent throughout the property? Are areas of the commercial property left in shadows?
• The colour of the lighting – could coloured lighting be used to better enhance the commercial landscape lighting installation? How accurately does the lighting render colour?
• The lighting’s efficiency – how much light per watt of electricity is being emitted? Is there a more efficient alternative?
• Lamp life – how long will the lamps last before they must be replaced? Is there a longer lasting option available?

Compare Lighting Types

Many older types of  landscape lighting fixtures or luminares (commonly used in parking lots) are inefficient because they project much of their light horizontally and upward rather than downwards. The commercial lighting experts at Nite Time Decor recommend replacing this type of lamp with a more modern downlighting fixture to increase the efficiency of the lighting effect.

Stick to Basic Colours

While the landscape lighting design you have at home might incorporate coloured lights to enhance certain features of your home or property, the landscape lighting design for your business should stick with bulbs that are white and light in colour. Clean white and light colours will help create a more professional ambiance that your customers will appreciate.

While clean light colours are recommended, it’s important to note that there are always exceptions that can be made. Depending on the type of both your property and your business, it may be beneficial to mix in some colour here and there.

Increased Brightness

Unlike residential landscape lighting design that aims for subtle brightness and warm tones, commercial landscape lighting design should be a fair bit brighter. The last thing you want to do is create a design that doesn’t fully illuminate your storefront and/or signage, or doesn’t grab the eyes of your prospective customers and clients. Increased brightness is also helpful in boosting the level of security around your business.

Illuminate Walkways

Having an eye-catching storefront that draws customers in even after the sun has set is great for business. But what is even more important is creating a safe and hazard-free environment. This is one of the reasons that having landscape lighting installed around your commercial property is so beneficial.

If a customer ­– or even just a person passing by – slips, trips or falls while on your property, you may be liable. To avoid a serious situation like this, make sure you illuminate walkways and other areas that where pedestrians may have an increased risk of falls (stairs, slopes etc.). Installing fixtures in these areas will help increase safety while also allowing you to create additional layers of depth in your landscape lighting design.

Lighting Steps for Safety

Another very important landscape lighting tip is lighting steps for safety. If your business has stairs leading to the door, these can be a major safety hazard after dark if the steps aren’t lit up. Lighting your stairs enhances the safety of your commercial property while also brightening the façade beautifully. How you light your stairs is going to depend on what kind of stairs you have, how wide they are, and how many steps there are.

A wider stair will require more landscape lighting. You’ll want to line them up along the outsides, as well as a line down the center of the stair to provide greater safety and visibility for visitors to your business. For thinner stairs, you have the option of installing landscape lighting along the outsides, or putting a single line up the center.

If your stairs are bordered by gardens, consider using commercial outdoor lighting in the gardens rather than on the steps themselves. These will need to be close to the steps to offer enough illumination. If you do this, you may also want to consider one of the mini wash lights from Nite Time Décor to direct the beam onto the steps.

Keep up on Landscaping Maintenance

If your business property has a lot of trees or large bushes, make sure to keep up on maintenance. Vast outgrowths of foliage will provide shelter for unwanted trespassers after dark, and will decrease the amount of safety provided by your commercial outdoor lighting. Trim the foliage frequently. Consider also making these natural features a part of your landscape lighting. When you light up the trees, trespassers don’t have as much cover in which to hide.

Spotlights brushing up through the leaves of your trees will create gorgeous patterns and eradicate the issue of security. You can also create a moonlight effect in your trees with downlighting, which will further reduce dark gaps in your landscape lighting security. Don’t over light though – choose either downlighting or spotlighting, but not both.

A well-designed commercial landscape lighting system becomes ineffective if plant growth blocks large portions of the light. Regularly pruning your plants and trees will help ensure that your commercial lighting system is performing to the best of it’s ability.

Downlight walls

Even if there are dark spaces on your commercial property, brightly illuminated walls will remove any safe entry points for trespassers, while contributing to your curb appeal. Downlight commercial outdoor lighting fixtures provide a beam large enough to cover vast portions of the wall, but do so in a way that elegantly illuminates your building. When customers pass the property, your building will softly glow in the night to impress their gaze.

Set the Mood at Your Restaurant

Many restaurants offer patios to eat and drink during the warmer months. Just because the patio is in use only for part of the year, doesn’t mean it should be neglected when it comes to lighting. Whether your business is a unique local restaurant or a part of a franchise, there are things you can do to transfer the mood of your establishment outside using commercial landscape lighting.

• Try our tiki lamps to create a soft, warm glow amongst your patrons.
• Light the way to the front door or around the patio with our in ground well lights.
• Using our downlight in your outdoor lighting design to shine a light on areas of the patio that are normally very dim or dark.

Commercial lighting can be challenging to successfully pull off on your own, but not to worry! Nite Time Decor has years of experience backing us up, and our creativity is bar none.

Contact a Professional

When it comes to your business, don’t let your competitors out-shine you when it comes to landscape lighting. Outdoor lighting plays a crucial role in the safety and security of commercial property. Whether you want to install a landscape lighting design around your commercial property or you simply want to learn more about how a lighting design can help your business, contact our professional and knowledgeable team today at Nite Time Décor.

We work with businesses throughout Halton, Hamilton, Mississauga, Oakville and Burlington. We’d love to shine a spotlight and help you put your business up in lights!