Twinkling lights add ambiance and extend your living space to the outdoors.
When Todd Peace was a child, free time was spent working at his family’s 50-acre nursery and landscape company in Mechanicsville. After earning a degree in landscape and horticulture design from North Carolina State University, he returned home to Richmond and the family business. But over the next 10 years, a new passion emerged. “I started doing lighting and found that I liked doing that much more,” he says. R•Home spoke with the designer and founder of Inaray Design Group about the ways lighting and technology can extend the luxury and comfort found inside the home to the outdoors.
R•Home: How has the way we use lighting and technology in our living spaces changed in the last 20 years?
Todd Peace: Rather than having one big speaker or one big light, we work to hide them by breaking them up into smaller elements. For example, we start with a television as a piece of art first, and now the face of the lighting and technology is designed in a way that you don’t notice it.
R•Home: Why is lighting so important for an outdoor space?
Peace: Well, most importantly, it has a major impact on how you feel in that space. Lighting creates a little bit of magic and wonder and rebuilds your space. For an example, a patio is not a room — so at night you have to rebuild the [feeling] of walls and a ceiling. The more you can make it feel like a room, the better the space will be and the more comfortable.
R•Home: How do you figure out what kind of lighting to design for an outdoor space?
Peace: We will look at the patio, walls, trees and sculptures to see where we will be putting the lights. Then the shape, height and color of those elements determines which fixture we will use to direct light in a more vertical manner. We figure out intensity of lighting by figuring out the wattage, think about beam spread — those sorts of things.
R•Home: What are the do’s and don’ts for outdoor lighting?
Peace: Well, one thing is to call a professional to help you. Also, it is good to experiment, but think before you buy. For example, someone might want to try Wi-Fi bulbs, but they need to remember that if your Wi-Fi trips, your lights won’t work.