String Lights - Lunares Blog

There’s an evening at the turn of November and December when the street splits into two camps: houses that sink into darkness, and those that suddenly look like a postcard. The difference is usually a few hours of work and a well-thought-out set: LED icicles on the eaves, a light curtain on the terrace, a string of lights around a tree trunk and glowing spheres in the garden. In this post we turn outdoor Christmas lights into a plan – from choosing a colour theme, through decorations for the façade, trees and garden, to power safety and mounting that leaves no scars on the house.

The gazebo and the pergola hold one quiet advantage over the rest of the garden: a structure of their own. Beams, rafters and posts are ready-made places for light – something an open lawn can only dream of. A well-lit gazebo becomes a second living room after dark: dinners run until midnight, cards get played, and a passing shower is waited out with a mug of tea. A badly lit one stands dark, or glares with a single bare bulb under the roof. In this post we show how to light a gazebo and a pergola in layers: a string of lights under the roof, wall lights on the posts, a lamp on the table and a pinch of automation that has the light waiting, ready, before you even sit down.

A summer evening has one flaw: it ends. When dusk falls after nine, the patio turns into a dark stage with no actors, and the balcony into a concrete niche nobody steps out onto any more. Yet it is precisely after dark, when the heat lets go, that sitting outside is at its loveliest. The difference between a terrace you flee back indoors from and one where conversations run past midnight usually comes down to two or three points of warm light. In this post we show how to build patio and balcony lighting out of ready-made blocks – string lights, rechargeable lamps, glowing spheres and solar lanterns – with no renovation or chiselling, and quite often without a socket.