Deck Lighting in Montgomery, OH

The back of a house in Montgomery (ZIP 45242) is rarely one flat wall. Additions, bays and wings put two or three changes of plane within thirty feet, and the deck wraps around them. Where every fitting goes is decided by those folds and by almost nothing else.

Light behaves differently at the two kinds of corner. Where a wall folds inward, two surfaces face each other and each one throws light back at the other, so an inside corner collects and goes noticeably brighter than the run either side of it. Where a wall turns outward, there is nothing beyond it to return anything, so the light simply leaves and the corner reads darker than the wall it came from. Put an evenly spaced row of fittings along a wall like this and you get a bright patch at every fold in and a dark one at every fold out.

So the spacing follows the wall. A fitting near an inside corner sits further from it and runs lower, because the corner is going to do part of the work for free. An outside corner takes a fitting close to it, aimed so it wraps the return, since that is the piece of wall the eye uses to read the shape of the house. The result is a back elevation that looks like one thing after dark instead of a row of unrelated bright spots.

The deck floor gets the same treatment. Where the deck wraps a corner, one length of guard looks out at the yard and the next looks back at your own brickwork a few feet away, and those two lengths want different amounts of light for the same reason. The one facing your own wall has a surface a few feet in front of it returning everything; the one facing the yard does not.