Outdoor Inspirations from a London Interior Designer

Outdoor Inspirations from a London Interior Designer

Illuminating Larger Gardens

The hottest new movement in lighting design for larger gardens involves a technique called “offset lighting.” Some of London’s top interior designers will use offset to illuminate a feature from the distance. This is perfect for larger gardens because it can be used to cast light out towards the very periphery of the garden to create focus while also building the sensation of wide-open spaces and expansive outdoorsy nature. An walkway or scenic area leading up to a hedgerow or water feature may be given extra definition when your interior designer uses this technique, while the plan of the garden is accorded better context.

Larger Gardens

As a professional interior designer, I truly believe that expansive, magnificent lawns are a centrepiece of larger gardens that often fail to get the attention they crave from lighting design teams. In my London interior design consultancy, I will sometimes recommend floodlights or spotlights mounted up high to create narrow paths of light that race across the lawn for superb night-time impact. During the London winters, I know all too well that lawns can be the only colourful zone of a larger garden. When you use lighting as I have just explained, your garden will be a source of visual interest while also providing relief from the dull whites and greys of the coolest months. As many professional interior designers know, this effect is preferable when one looks at the garden from a single perspective. I particularly like it in winter when viewed from inside. The technique is less ideal in summer when viewed from the garden itself, as the lighting can lead to glare. Your interior designer might recommend a seasonal switching board so that these lights can be deactivated automatically during London’s summer months.

Larger Gardens

Water is an attractive feature in any garden but, as a professional interior designer, I truly believe that it is most fabulous when it can be scaled up in a larger town or country garden. I adore waterfalls, babbling brooks, swimming pools and lakes, and I always tell my clients that the subtle use of lighting can enhance the glistening beauty of water to create splendid high-impact garden designs. Plants and trees are similarly wonderful in larger landscaped gardens, but thinking ahead is key in this context. Since trees and shrubs grow and flower during different seasons, they will create changing panoramas for your larger garden at different times of the year. As a consequence, your interior designer will recommend the creation of flexible lighting concepts that can easily be modified to suit any given month. In large London gardens it has become popular to use spike-equipped hardware – the illuminator is simply prodded into the earth, where it stays in place until it needs to be moved again for the subsequent season. Such hardware is ideal for uplighting summer foliage from the lawnside or silhouetting a bare and wintry branch from the flowerbed. Many London interior designers will take advantage of shrubbery and perennials that lie close to the ground, where they can hide the spikes of the lighting fixtures. Such foliage will still permit the light to trickle out, provided you employ a talented gardener who can prune regularly right next to the illuminator. One last hint from my clever interior designer team in London: light can often seem overwhelmingly bright outside at night because there is such an intense contrast against the darkness. For this reason, we always recommend the use of a glare control feature, such as a gel, diffuser, or filter, so that your evening garden party guests will not be blinded.