Landscape lighting design

A garden is used most in the evening. We design for that hour. Poppy Room is a lighting design studio on the San Francisco Peninsula, and landscape lighting is the center of our practice. We design the lighting for a property, then hand your team, or your client's installer, a complete design to build from.

Most landscape lighting is bought as fixtures. A crew walks the property, places uplights at the obvious trees, stakes path lights along the walk, and wires it to a transformer. The result can be fine. It is rarely composed. The properties that feel right at night were designed first: someone decided which parts of the garden should be bright, which should stay dark, and how the eye should move from the front gate to the door.

That is the work we do. We start from the planting plan and the way the family actually uses the garden after dark. We decide what carries light, at what level, and from where. Dark areas are part of the design. Then we document it precisely enough that an installation crew can build it without us standing there.

How we work

We work from your drawings. A planting plan, a site survey, or a good set of photographs is enough to start. We visit the property, walk it at dusk when we can, and return with a lighting design: a plan showing every fixture, its location, its aiming, and its purpose.

For landscape architects, we work under your name. The lighting design folds into your drawing set and your client hears from you. For installers, we do the design work so your proposal leads with a composed result instead of a fixture count. Either way, the installation is yours. We do not sell fixtures and we do not compete for the install.

What you receive

• A lighting plan, to scale, with every fixture located and numbered
• A fixture schedule with lamping, wattage, color temperature, and finish
• Aiming notes and mounting details for anything nonstandard
• Zoning and scene descriptions for the control system, written plainly
• One round of revisions after the first installed review at night

The plan is the deliverable an installer actually needs. We describe what a real one contains in our guide to landscape lighting plans.

What we design

Gardens, paths, and terraces. Trees, from a single specimen oak to a wooded parcel. Facades and arrival sequences, covered separately under facade and arrival lighting. Pools, steps, and outdoor dining. Path and garden work in detail is under garden and path lighting.

We hold to a few disciplines throughout. One color temperature per property, usually 2700K. Shielded fixtures aimed so the source stays hidden. Restraint with brightness, because the eye adapts to the darkness of a garden and a little light goes far. Our thinking on this is in the guides on dark-sky lighting at home and color temperature outdoors.

Where we work

We serve the Peninsula and South Bay: Los Altos Hills, Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, Saratoga, Los Gatos, Hillsborough, and Menlo Park.