Deck Lighting in Cheviot, OH

On the small back yards in Cheviot (ZIP 45211) the deck takes most of the space, so a wide step down to the yard earns its keep twice. It is a step, and at sixteen to eighteen inches it is also where people sit when there are more of them than there are chairs.

That creates the one exception to the first rule of deck lighting. A fitting goes in every riser, because a flight in the dark is where somebody falls. But a riser fitting throws horizontally out of the face of the step, at roughly the height of the calves of anybody sitting on it, straight into the space in front of it. On a step used as a bench that is a lamp pointing out from under the seat at everybody standing in the yard talking to whoever is sitting on it.

So the seating step is treated differently from the flight. It gets a fitting under the nosing of the tread above instead, tucked back and throwing down onto the tread surface, so the step still reads clearly as a change of level and there is no source facing outward at seated height. Every other riser on the flight keeps the standard detail, because nobody sits on those.

It is the sort of thing that only shows up if somebody asks how the deck is actually used, which on a lot this size is worth asking. A wide step in a small yard is furniture. Treating it as a stair and nothing else is what puts a light in the wrong place.