Must-Have Lighting For Your Pool This Season

Here we put together the must-have lighting for your pool this season! While many overlook the importance of lighting around pools, pool lighting plays a tremendous role in the usability of your pool. While lighting positioned on the interior of a pool seems to be sufficient to extend your pool’s usability into nighttime, pool lighting around the exterior of your pool and pool deck plays an even more important role. Whether you’re trying to expand the aesthetics of your pool’s ambiance, extend its usability during warm evenings or make your pool deck and surrounding landscaping functional and safe during evening hours, adding lighting to the landscape around your pool is an important feature that you don’t want to miss.

The Best Lighting Options For Your Pool This Season

Lighting Walkways

Lighting walkways are important components of lighting in the vicinity of your pool. Since safety is paramount, and pool areas tend to be more slippery than other areas of your home and yard, ensuring that users can identify where the walkway is and any accumulated moisture, allows anyone to use the pool with ease (especially if you’re wearing flipflops!). The great thing about illuminating walkways is that you don’t need a lot of lighting or obtrusive lighting to have an impressive effect. Small fixtures or well lights offer incredible visual effects while providing excellent safety for pool paths.

Lighting Water Features

If you’ve invested in waterfalls or fountains in proximity to your pool, providing spotlighting or wall lights underneath the water features can create a dramatic effect that can enhance the style of your pool.

Hardscape lighting

If you have retaining walls including wall-mounted lighting, particularly underneath the capstone at the top of the wall, provides a nice balance between illuminating the pool deck surface as well as creating a nice visual effect that provides abundant light without glaring beams.

Lighting Vegetation

Where decorative grasses, small shrubs, or even trees line the perimeter of your pool, providing spotlighting underneath this vegetation can provide a dramatic effect. Where vegetation lines walkways or even fenced-in pool decks, well lights, downlights, and even short path lights can amplify the nighttime aura of this vegetation while also providing functional lighting for all walkways.

Tiki Torches and Bistro Lighting

There’s no better way to create the island vibe around your pool than to include tiki torches. Tiki torches should be placed on the periphery of your pool deck area, fence, or along a walkway that is a safe distance from passersby. Tiki torches have the added benefit of being capable of providing insect-repelling services if you also happen to have mosquito problems. Some tiki torches also have light options even when they are not lit! For a non-flammable option, a bistro positioned over verandas, gazebos, arbors, or posts suspended around or across a pool provides a unique lighting vibe that creates an authentic outdoor festive spirit.

Lighting Pool Deck Steps

Whether your pool deck or patio includes steps accessing the surface or any stepped changes of elevation along the surface, it’s important to use lighting to ensure that these areas are accessible and safe any time of day. Lighting can be positioned on the tread of the steps, on the periphery or along the risers (vertical portions) of the step walls providing maximum illumination that can also provide a dramatic effect when accessing the pool area.

However you use your pool, including lighting in the area around the pool increases accessibility during those beautiful summer nights, creates a festive and dramatic dynamic for outdoor gatherings, and ensures that everyone is safe regardless of whether they are in or out of the water. If you’re looking to make your pool the perfect spot for your summer get-togethers, we’d love to be able to share our lighting experience to make your pool parties light up the night. Our designers are ready to meet with you to create a custom lighting design for your home so you can enjoy your pool day or night. Call us at (262) 358-9100 to schedule your design consultation.