The speciality · garden & external lighting
A garden you can still see in January.
Garden lighting is where electrical work stops being plumbing for electrons and starts being design. It's also the half of this business we're best known for. Done properly it's invisible by day and completely changes a garden after dark — a wall grazed from below, a specimen tree washed from two sides, a run of steps made safe without a single glaring fitting. We'd strongly recommend a professional garden lighting plan is drawn up for your garden before anything is installed, and we'd typically advise allowing somewhere around 6–10% of the overall build budget for the lighting alone. With current LED technology we can design and install low-energy schemes that cost very little to run and give you the garden back for the half of the year you'd otherwise never see it.
How a scheme is put together.
Two things separate a designed garden from a floodlit one: a plan drawn before anything is bought, and kit chosen to still be working in ten years.
The plan comes first
01Before anything is specified we walk the garden — ideally once in daylight and once after dark. We look at levels, sightlines from inside the house, what's worth lighting and what genuinely isn't. That becomes a plan: fitting positions, beam angles, circuits and zones. It's a small amount of work up front that stops a garden ending up with twelve identical spike lights pointed at a fence.
- Daylight walk-round
- After-dark visit
- Drawn lighting plan
- Budget guide: 6–10%
Low voltage, low energy
02Most decorative garden schemes run at 12V from a transformer housed in a protected enclosure, which makes them far safer to work around planting beds and much easier to extend later. All-LED, so a whole garden lit for an evening costs about as much as leaving a kettle on for a few minutes. Fittings are chosen for IP rating and material, because British weather finds the cheap ones within two winters.
- 12V LED fittings
- IP-rated for British weather
- Buried, protected cable
- Zoned & dimmable
Four rules we light to.
01
Light the thing, not the garden
The commonest mistake is lighting everything to the same level, which flattens a garden into a car park. We light in layers — a graze up a wall, a wash across paving, a marker at a step, one tree given proper attention — and leave the gaps dark on purpose. You should see the effect, not the source.
02
Safety where the ground changes
Steps, level changes, the edge of a terrace and the route from the gate to the front door get lit first, because that's the part of the job that actually matters on a wet January evening. Low, shielded fittings that put light on the tread rather than into the eyes of whoever is walking up.
03
Built to survive a Berkshire winter
Corrosion-resistant materials, proper IP ratings for where each fitting sits, cable buried at sensible depth and protected, and real weatherproof connectors rather than tape and optimism. A garden scheme should still be working in ten years with nothing more than the occasional clean and a re-aim after the planting has grown.
04
Set on site, after dark
No lighting plan survives contact with a real garden untouched. Once everything is in, we come back on a dark evening and spend the time aiming, shielding and dimming — because that final hour is the difference between a garden that looks designed and a garden that looks lit.
And the practical half
Security lighting counts too.
Not every outdoor job wants a design. PIR floodlights down a side return, a light over the back door, driveway and gate lighting, a lit path from the car to the house — everyday external lighting, fitted with weatherproof glands and junctions and cable run properly rather than clipped to a fence panel. We'll happily do just that and say nothing more about schemes.
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