Landscape lighting design and control · Kansas City.

Below: how we design a yard, how it is controlled, how it ties to audio and cameras, and what to settle on paper first. We give a fixed price after a no-cost site walk, not a range by email.

Designing the yard, not just placing fixtures

A landscape lighting plan starts with how the property is used after dark. Where do people arrive? Which paths do they walk? Where do they sit, and what do they look at from inside the house? The answers decide where light belongs, and just as often where it does not. A yard lit evenly from end to end looks like a parking lot. A yard lit in layers, with the approach, the paths, the trees and the places people gather each treated on their own, looks like a garden at night.

So the design is drawn in zones. The front approach, the back patio, the pool deck, the path to a firepit and the trees along the property line are often separate, because you want them at different levels or at different hours. Each zone becomes a circuit the control system can address. The count is set on the plan, from a walk of the property, before anything is wired.

Fixtures are chosen to sit quietly in the beds by day. Where the lighting shares a bed with outdoor speakers, matching the two families keeps the garden from looking like a catalog. Coastal Source, whose outdoor speakers we install, also builds a landscape lighting line in solid bronze and brass, and its bollard speakers are made to sit among landscape fixtures. More on that on the Coastal Source system page.

Control from the same keypads and app as the house

Most landscape lighting runs on a timer inside the transformer, set once and forgotten until it is wrong. Brought onto a Lutron or Control4 system, the yard becomes part of the house instead. Each zone is a load like any room inside, which changes what you can do with it.

• Sunset schedules that follow the season. The control system keeps an astronomical clock, so the lights come on at dusk in June and in December without anyone resetting a timer. The yard can step down to a late-night level at an hour you choose and go off before dawn.
• Scenes that include the yard. A button by the back door lights the patio and the path. An Evening scene sets the whole property. The Away scene can include the landscape, so the house looks lived in when nobody is home. These are the same scenes that already run the rooms indoors.
• One app, and your voice. The landscape zones appear in the same Control4, Crestron or Lutron app as everything else, and Josh.ai reaches them too. There is no separate lighting app to remember.
• Buttons that say what they do. The keypad by the back door is engraved after the plan is settled, so Patio, Path and Yard Off mean the same thing to a guest as they do to you.

If the inside of the house already runs on Lutron, the landscape is an extension of the lighting control you use every day. If it runs on Control4, the yard joins the same home automation system. Either way the outside of the house stops being a second system.

Tying the lighting to outdoor audio and cameras

Light and sound outdoors are usually planned by different trades, which is how a yard ends up with two schedules and two apps. Planned together, one press warms the yard and brings the music up, and at dusk both come on together on one clock. The bollard speakers and the light fixtures can share the same beds and the same trench, and the outdoor audio zones line up with the lighting zones, so a patio is one place with one button.

Cameras gain more from good lighting than most people expect. Steady light on a driveway, a side gate or a back door gives a camera a cleaner night image than infrared alone, and color you can actually use. It also works the other way: a driveway sensor or a camera detection can bring the path lights up when someone arrives. The one thing to get right is aim. A fixture that lights the scene for the camera helps; one that shines into the lens blinds it. We place the two on the same drawing so that conflict is caught on paper. The camera side is on our security camera page.

What to decide before trenching

A trench that is open costs little to add a cable to. One that has been backfilled, planted and irrigated is a different job. Settle these on a drawing first, ideally with the landscape architect or contractor at the table, at the schematic stage of the planting plan.

• Fixture locations and zones. Every fixture on the plan, grouped into the zones you want to control separately. Adding a zone later usually means another run back to the transformer.
• Transformer locations and how they are controlled. Where each transformer sits, how many circuits it feeds, and how each circuit reaches the control system to be switched or dimmed. The outdoor receptacles that feed them are the electrician’s work, so they belong on the same drawing.
• Sleeves under hardscape. Every path, driveway and patio a cable has to cross needs a sleeve before it is poured or laid. Add spare sleeves; they cost almost nothing now.
• The speaker cable and the lighting cable together. If outdoor audio is coming, now or later, its cable belongs in the same trench plan. Running both at once is one dig instead of two.
• Irrigation and planting. Fixtures and speakers placed where the sprinklers hit them every morning, or where a shrub will swallow them in three summers, are a slow problem. Lining the plan up with the irrigation zones and the mature size of the planting avoids it.
• Camera views. Mark where the cameras will look, so the lighting serves them instead of fighting them.

On a new build, these belong with the rest of the low-voltage plan, before the exterior is finished. On an existing home, a site walk tells us what can reach the control system from where it is today.

Related services

Most projects combine two or three of these. Worth a read.

• Outdoor and Landscape AudioCoastal Source bollards, buried subwoofers and IP68 Plug+Play connectors — audio that survives a KC decade.→
• Smart Lighting · Kansas City metroWhole-home lighting control on both sides of the state line — the Lutron tiers and Control4 lighting as one architecture.→
• Outdoor TV InstallationDisplays rated for shade or full sun, with outdoor audio to match.→

Start with the site walk

Draw the yard once, then light it, wire it and run it from one place.

Plan a site walk (913) 804-7575

Or see Lutron lighting running in our Overland Park showroom

Further reading: planning an outdoor entertainment space, how to build a weatherproof outdoor AV setup, and how smart lighting saves energy. Serving Overland Park and Leawood.