The offering

A garden is looked at from inside the house for most of the hours anyone is home. Garden lighting is what makes those hours count: trees uplit, paths readable, and the fittings themselves out of sight.

The test of garden lighting is that you see the garden and not the lights. That means low mounting heights, warm lamps, shielded optics and fittings tucked into planting rather than lined up along a path like runway markers.

We design in layers. Uplighting gives the large trees and the gables their form back at night. Low level path and step lighting handles safety, which matters most on the sloped sites common on the Peninsula. Feature lighting picks out a water feature, a pool or a stone wall. Then the whole scheme is zoned, so an ordinary Tuesday evening does not run at the same level as a dinner outside.

Almost everything we install is 12 volt, which is safer to run through planting and far easier to extend later. It also sits comfortably on a battery or inverter supply, which in this country is a practical point rather than a technical one: a garden that goes dark with the grid is a garden nobody walks in during load shedding.

Fittings on the Atlantic Seaboard are specified for salt air. Marine grade stainless or solid brass costs more at installation and is the cheaper decision within a few seasons, because powder coated aluminium near the sea does not last.

What is included