Outdoor Inspirations from a London Interior Designer

Outdoor Inspirations from a London Interior Designer

Larger Gardens

Just as for more compact gardens, your London interior designer will create the perfect landscape lighting concept by first identifying the key features of your larger town or country garden. By “features,” we mean those zones or elements that are most unique or attractive and that can best be beautified with light. “Soft features” include perennials, flowerbeds, or shrubberies. “Structural features” are things like garden gnomes, urns, or fountains. Your interior designer will work hard to hide the light fixture and bulb so that only the effect is visible. With a large garden, in my opinion the most important thing is understanding when to stop. Should your interior designer illuminate the entire garden? Or just specific regions? If you live in London, will your neighbours be concerned about a very bright garden being overwhelming at night? All this and more must be taken into account.

Larger Gardens

How much light and what types of effects you request from your interior designer will be largely determined by your own personal taste. First and foremost, be sure to think about how the garden will be used and from where guests and residents will see the garden illumination scheme – from inside the house, seated in and gazing out across the garden itself, and maybe even while looking back towards the house. Your interior designer will help you focus on different themes. If your larger garden is in London, perhaps casting light on a thin concrete strip will be optimal to help safely guide residents to the garage and street beyond. Alternatively, if you are in the countryside, focused and smaller-scale illumination can cause the fields and parkland beyond to fade into darkness, leaving an air of subtle mystery and magic. Many of London’s best interior designers call this “strategic lighting.” Furthermore, light pollution in big cities like London is destroying our ability to see starry nights, and as a result interior designers will often consider outdoor illumination strategies very carefully to avoid excess “light-spill” and conserve electricity.

Larger Gardens

Larger gardens tend to have many different and attractive features – like a pagoda, lake, glen or fountain. Your interior designer will recommend comfortable seating areas that optimise guests’ enjoyment of your garden at its best. Some interior designers will include elements such as canopies to create a covered walk-area that allows for passage from the house to a specific showcase garden feature. A canopy can be perfect for rainy days, especially given London’s often-changing weather patterns. Canopies can also be used to build a strong visual focus, perhaps with wickerwork chairs or a garden table underneath. Your interior designer in London will also suggest illumination ideas to draw the eye towards the main features of interest. For example, huts and pagodas can benefit from uplighters that beautifully silhouette their shape at night.

Illuminating Larger Gardens

Some interior designers (myself included) will pay great attention to creating and illuminating natural canopies for larger gardens. For example, a sweep of climbing vines or scent-filled honeysuckle can look amazing when lit from above or from below. Top London interior designers will often hide a small spotlight in the stonework of a tall tower feature or mansion to illuminate a table or other visual interest zone that may be at ground level. Pergolas are well-suited to multi-functional up/downlighters which can build structural definition while simultaneously uplighting foliage and downlighting the path beneath. Your interior designer may recommend fibre optics or LEDs for this purpose, installed so as to echo the idea of twinkling stars in the night sky.