Cincinnati, OH
(513) 533-2300

Landscape Lighting

Landscape lighting planned as part of the design, not added on afterward

Kichler Design Pro LED fixtures, drawn into the same plan as the planting and the stonework, and tested before they ever go in the ground.

Chapter 01

Designing the light, not scattering fixtures

A lot of landscape lighting gets added the same way, after the fact: a handful of well lights aimed up a tree, a path light every few feet along a walk, installed once the planting and the hardscape are already finished. It usually looks like exactly what it is, fixtures scattered around a finished landscape rather than light that was planned as part of it.

Perrino treats lighting as part of the original design, not a separate add on service. The same designers who draw the planting plan and the hardscape decide where light actually belongs on a Cincinnati property, so a stone retaining wall, a paver patio and a specimen tree end up lit as one composition instead of three unrelated decisions made by whoever happened to be on site that day.

Aerial view of a brick Cincinnati townhome courtyard patio lit with string lighting.

Aerial view of a brick Cincinnati townhome courtyard patio lit with string lighting.

Kichler Design Pro LED and a fifteen year warranty

The fixtures themselves are Kichler Design Pro LED, the same system used across every lighting install Perrino runs, so a client adding a second phase later isn't stuck matching an obsolete product line from a first phase installed years earlier. Every fixture in that system carries a fifteen year warranty.

Perrino Landscape has installed and serviced this system from its Wooster Rd office in Cincinnati, reachable at (513) 533-2300, on properties across Indian Hill, Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, Anderson Township and Monfort Heights. A warranty that long only means something if the company behind it is still around to honor it, and this one has been operating under Andy Perrino since 1999.

Chapter 03

Every fixture tested before it goes in the ground

A landscape lighting fixture that fails after installation is a real problem, because finding it usually means digging back into a bed that has already been backfilled and replanted around the wiring. Perrino tests every fixture on the bench before it goes in the ground, so a faulty unit gets caught and swapped before install rather than after.

It is a simple step that gets skipped elsewhere because it takes extra time on install day. On a system built around Kichler Design Pro LED fixtures with a fifteen year warranty behind them, testing on the bench first is what actually makes that warranty worth something, since the fixtures placed in the ground were confirmed working rather than assumed working.

What light does to a garden after dark

A garden that Perrino designed, built and planted reads completely differently once the sun goes down, and landscape lighting is what lets it keep reading at all after dark instead of disappearing into a dark yard. A stone wall that has real texture in daylight goes flat under a single floodlight, but grazing light across its face at a low angle brings that texture back out after sunset.

The same is true of planting. A specimen tree lit only from underneath reads as a flat silhouette against the house, while the same tree lit from two or three angles at different heights keeps its actual shape and canopy visible. That is the difference between a yard with some lights in it and a Cincinnati garden that still looks designed after dark, which is the whole point of building the lighting plan alongside the planting plan in the first place, rather than after it.

Perrino Landscape. Member of the Ohio Nursery and Landscape Association and the Better Business Bureau. Call (513) 533-2300.

A patio with a dining table at a Cincinnati home, part of a Perrino Landscape hardscape and lighting project.

Reading the plan after dark

The same patio, seen two different ways

During the day a patio like this one reads through its paver joints, its seating layout and the beds around it. After dark, low level fixtures set into the beds and along the steps carry that same layout forward instead of letting it vanish once the sun is down, so the space stays usable and legible into the evening.