Landscape lighting ideas for Ohio and Pennsylvania homes

A dark house disappears at five in the afternoon for half the year. Good landscape lighting gives the evening back, and it does it in a handful of distinct ways. Which ones suit your property depends on what you have, and the homes across this region give a lighting designer plenty to work with.

Uplight the architecture

The detail a house was built with, the stone, the brick, the columns and gables, vanishes after dusk. Uplighting brings it back. On the older homes of the region, the Tudors and Colonial Revivals of a Boardman or a Mt. Lebanon, this is often the most striking single thing you can do. The trick is restraint: light the detail, not the whole wall.

Light the trees

A mature tree takes uplight better than almost any feature on a property, and it is the thing that reads from the road. This region is full of them. Akron alone has earned Tree City recognition many times over, and a single well-lit specimen tree can carry a whole front yard.

If a property has one thing worth lighting, it is usually a tree the owner stopped noticing years ago.

Make the paths and steps safe first

Path lighting is about footing before it is about looks, and steps in particular. Done well it does both at once, guiding people to the door while quietly shaping the approach. On the sloped lots common through the South Hills and the river valleys, this is not optional so much as essential.

Extend the patio, pool and pavilion

An outdoor room that goes dark at sunset is an outdoor room you stop using in September. Lighting a patio, a pool surround or a pavilion pushes the evening and the season further out, and turns a space that sat empty after dark into one that gets used.

Wash the hardscape and beds

Retaining walls, garden beds and stonework are best washed rather than spotted, a soft even light that shows the texture without glaring. On the terraced, walled lots that come with hilly ground, this ties the whole scheme together at the base.

Brick colonials and farmhouses

Much of the housing across Ohio and western Pennsylvania is brick colonial, farmhouse or foursquare, and those facades take light well. Uplighting placed to graze the brick brings out the texture and the mortar lines, while a symmetrical home rewards a balanced pair of lights on the corners and a lit entry between them. The trick is restraint: enough light to model the face of the house, not so much that it glows flat.

Mature trees and heavy canopy

This is a heavily treed part of the country, and several of the towns we serve carry Tree City recognition. A mature tree is the single feature that takes uplight best, so on a wooded lot the trees often become the headline and the house the backdrop. Uplighting the trunk and lower canopy, or dropping a moonlight down through the branches, gives a yard depth that facade lighting alone cannot.

Hardscape, patios and steps

A lit facade is only half of an outdoor scheme. Patios, walls, steps and garden beds are where a home is actually used after dark, and low, shielded fixtures make those spaces usable and safe without glare. Step and path lighting earns its keep on the grade changes common on rolling regional lots, and a soft wash on a retaining wall or a planting bed fills in the middle ground between the house and the trees.

Designing for the winter view

In this climate the landscape spends months bare, and a scheme that only works in summer leaves the house dark for half the year. Lighting the architecture and the trunk structure of deciduous trees means the yard still reads in January, when a bare tree uplit against snow can be as striking as it is in leaf. It is worth planning the layout around what the yard looks like with the leaves down, not just up.

How far to take it

Not every home needs the full treatment, and a good design says so. Some houses want the facade and the entry and nothing more. Others have the trees, the hardscape and the grounds to carry a fully layered scheme. Walking the property after dark is how that gets decided honestly, feature by feature, rather than selling the same package to every house on the street.

Start by seeing it

The hard part of choosing among these is imagining them on your own house, which is exactly why Nikola lights the property in person before quoting. Book a free consultation and you will see the real effect after dark before deciding anything. You can read more about the landscape lighting service, or see where we work on the service areas page.