Architectural and Facade Lighting

Grazing and washing are two different jobs

Put a fixture tight against a wall, aimed almost straight up the face of it, and the light travels across the surface at a shallow angle. Every projection casts a small shadow. On rough limestone, tumbled brick or a stone chimney this is transformative: you suddenly see the coursing, the tooling, the irregularity of the hand that laid it. That is grazing.

Pull the same fixture back several feet and aim it up at a steeper angle and the light lands evenly. Shadows disappear and the wall reads as one calm plane. That is washing, and on smooth stucco, painted siding or fine-jointed brick it is the right answer, because grazing a smooth surface only reveals that the surface is smooth.

Getting this backwards is the most common fault we find on facades lit by somebody else. Grazed stucco looks patchy and cheap. Washed fieldstone looks like a flat photograph of fieldstone.

Rooflines, gables and the glare problem

Uplighting a two-storey elevation from the ground is where most schemes go wrong. Aim high enough to reach the gable and the beam continues past it into the night sky, and anyone standing in the drive is looking straight into a bright source.

The fixes are shielding, beam-spread selection and, more often than people expect, putting the fixture somewhere other than the ground. A tight-beam fixture set into a soffit, or mounted in a tree opposite the elevation, lights a gable from above and keeps the source out of every sight line on the property.

Columns, arches and repeated elements

A colonnade or an arcade has rhythm built into it, and lighting can either keep that rhythm or destroy it. One fixture per column, matched in output and aim, reads as architecture. A general flood across the whole run reads as a car park.

Arches are lit from directly above the opening so the curve carries the light around and the reveal holds its depth. The hero photograph at the top of this page is one fixture per arch, every one of them tucked where you would have to be looking for it.

Colour temperature changes the material

Kelvin is not a brightness setting, it is the colour of the light, and it interacts with the colour of the thing you point it at.

Warm light, around 2700K, flatters brick, limestone, cedar, copper and anything with red or yellow in it. Push a cooler lamp at warm brick and the brick goes grey and dead. Cooler light, nearer 3000K and above, keeps grey stone, blue-grey siding and green foliage looking like themselves rather than jaundiced.

Most homes need more than one temperature. A house of warm brick with a slate roof and mature green planting wants one answer on the walls and a different one in the trees, and the specification sheet on your drawing records which lamp goes where so a technician six years from now replaces like with like.

Where this work goes

Facade lighting is the core of what we do on residential properties, and it is also most of our commercial work: church elevations, civic buildings, monuments and stone memorials. The technique does not change with the scale. Henderson's Italianate and Victorian brick, Jasper's Romanesque masonry and a 1990s Owensboro stone-and-siding elevation are each solved with the same set of decisions, made differently.