Inventive lighting technologies and designs create a stunning outdoor living space.
Determining the best lighting scheme for your swimming pool does much more than give you opportunities for nighttime swims and post-sunset relaxation. A well-devised plan—with the proper products, design, and landscape interface—can create a beautifully personalized, safer setting for the pool and the entire landscape.
With technology that seems to advance in the blink of an eye, pool professionals are developing dramatic new options for lighting, rendering a customized pool that is beautiful and safe after the sun sinks into the west. The key, experts say, is a professional team that prioritizes planning and coordination, plus an educated consumer.
Howard Roberts, owner of Liquid Inc. and Liquidscapes, says that new features in pool design are opening oceans of ways to use lighting. Roberts recently finished a project in Morristown, New Jersey, that abundantly demonstrates how lighting is tied to creative design. The home’s poolscape includes a custom-made pergola with a chandelier of overhanging lights crowning a beautiful mahogany dining table. Lighting around the roof illuminates the grill station and bar, uplighting shines on stands of trees, and ceramic balls with LED lights lead from the indoor kitchen to the outdoor grill area. The project, Roberts says, started with the chandelier, which the homeowner had fallen in love with.
Automation, LED, and fiber optics go far to make a splash with color and design or to create a theme. “Fire bowls and other fire features like pits and fireplaces, and obviously lighting throughout the landscaping in the soft-scape, grill stations, and so forth, are all means to the illumination options available today,” Roberts adds. His big takeaway for homeowners is to study before you plunge. “Do your due diligence. People want value and return on investment, and they want it long term. Our work speaks for who we are. We constantly educate consumers so they’re in a position of strength.” liquidscapes.net
Coordinating perimeter lighting throughout a landscape’s features, including the pool and spa, creates dramatic dimension. The application might be standard lighting around the pool or just above the water level, reflective lighting around columns with fire bowls, illuminated stepping stone paths to the pool, or indirect lighting reflecting off the pool. Diffused lighting is beautiful around the backsides of benches or under counters in an outdoor kitchen.
