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The front elevation of any house, whether in an urban area or in a set back rural location will benefit from some form of wall lighting.
Discreetly done, lighting the exterior of the house can add value and enhance the night time ambience. Indeed, it can also be a security feature. Thieves rarely like houses that are well lit up.
In rural, one off houses in Ireland, floodlighting was probably the first attempt by owners to illuminate the front of their house. This involved projecting floodlighting onto to the front of the house from the garden area.
It looked novel at first; the fad took off and soon every house on a lonely country road was floodlit. Then it became garish because the lonely country road suddenly looked like one long shopping mall at night.
The other disadvantage from the homeowner’s point of view was that when they, or their visitors, emerged from their front door, temporarily blindness occurred such was the glare of powerful spotlights shining in their faces.
Discreet it was not!
The advent of down lighters built into the soffit of the roof was much more effective. These are placed generally over windows and are recessed into the soffit giving off a nice glow over each window.
Another more low-key means of lighting the walls of your house is by installing pilaster lights around doorways and windows. These are traditional lantern type lights commonly seen on new build houses in Ireland for the last decade or so. The pilaster is an architectural element in classical architecture and gives the appearance of a supporting column, with only an ornamental function. Pilaster lights give an architecture structure decoration effects.
Pilaster lights often appear on pilaster structures on the sides of a door or window opening on the facade of a building, and are sometimes paired with square or round columns set at some distance away from the wall that support a roof structure above, such as a portico. They are a very effective way of lighting the exterior wall of Georgian or Edwardian houses.
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