Sometimes, professional growth comes from careful practice. Other times, it comes from taking on a challenge and using the experience and skills of your team to step up to it. That’s one of the lessons Mike Deo, president and lead designer for NatureScape Lighting and Audio, Millington, New Jersey, learned during the winning project in the Landscape Lighting category in the 2024 Changing the Landscape Awards.
Getting started with this huge undertaking was made a little bit easier by the fact that Deo had been working with this client couple for more than a dozen years already, he says.
“We’ve done multiple projects in their New Jersey home, and they loved those projects,” he says.
He already had a strong understanding of what styles they enjoyed most and had a sense of what techniques might work best for them.
Even with that advantage, however, he was still facing a sizeable challenge in the design phase for the installation: The property itself hadn’t been built yet. Deo’s client helped turn that blank canvas into an opportunity for a bespoke, unique design developed just for this property. He introduced Deo to the architect, Anderson Campanella Architecture, and builder, Dearborn Builders, and told them to work with Deo on what he needed for the plan.
“I started to work with the architect to design the accent lighting for the building itself, that was a collaboration,” he says. “Because the client and I had experience and the relationship already there, I didn’t have to battle too hard for my place at the table, which often happens.”
Big steps
The first challenge was a stairwell on the back of the house that needed safety lighting, but didn’t have much space to work with. The custom stairwell floated on a stainless steel spine, which wasn’t a routing option for the wiring used for the lighting. The slab steps were to be illuminated on either side with fixtures mounted in the posts, but getting power to the fixtures was going to be a problem. The posts were open at the bottom as well, meaning wiring couldn’t have run there either. Hours of design went into that part of the project, with a lot of options landing on the cutting room floor, says Deo.
Because he was working closely with the architect and the stairs were already custom pieces, they found a solution that satisfied both teams, he says.
“What we actually did was modify the top rail, that mahogany handrail, to use half-inch tubing that it sits on. That tubing carried our wires from post to post and back to the power source,” he says. “We went through innumerable iterations before we landed where we did. Those staircases and the railings are very cool.”
Being able to work with the architect, who could mock up different ideas digitally while they collaborated, allowed them to make the most of their expertise. It might’ve taken some extra time in the planning stage, but it made a difference when it came to the installation.
“That was critical to the success of this project,” Deo says.
Another of the major elements centered around the outside bar by the pool. On either side of the bar itself, the architect planned for columns that emulated the look of a tree with branches spreading overhead.
“It holds up the deck above but then becomes a sculptural element when you’re sitting at the bar,” says Deo. They decided to use a fixture that spread light both above and below through multiple LEDs that could be controlled separately. Again, working with the architect in the design stage helped them choose a precise location to get the most out of the fixture, even though the LEDs had different beam spreads.
“Working at scale, we emulated the beam spread coming from the LEDs so that we had a pretty equal bow-tie shape, even though the fixture itself is at about two-thirds of the height,” Deo says. “We wanted the beam spread hitting the floor to exactly where it would hit on the ceiling. We adjusted it until they were perfect.”
A few yards away from the bar is a screened-in, non-air-conditioned space that the clients referred to as a “Zen room.” Trying to keep with that theme, Deo used six wall-mounted uplights around the room that are both shielded and indirect to give a sense of serenity without visible light sources.
“The lighting comes from the walls, hits the ceiling and then fills the space with soft and direct illumination,” he says.
The rest of the structure brought additional challenges for Deo, such as how to effectively highlight the entries using glare shielding and creative wiring. They recessed downlights in garage doorjambs to highlight Alaskan cedar doors while drive-over uplights carried illumination up to the highest soffits of the house.
Once past the gates, Deo wanted the property to have a feeling of enclosure. “I wanted there to be a sense of comfort, a secure sense of space,” he says. He used lighting to bring attention to the walls of the house and the surrounding landscaping to complete the effect. Key to this approach is using indirect lighting to bring out texture in the surfaces and the landscaping without centering the light on any single spot. “I wanted indirect lighting for walking around the space. There’s no floodlights on this house.”
The dimmable landscape and path lighting make up seven zones, and an entire transformer “farm” was created under the front porch to power it. “Everything can be dialed in and synchronized for timing and brightness,” he says. The scheduled presets are designed to provide the right amount of light needed for the time of day. “You need more lighting at dusk than you do at midnight. Then, a half hour after sunset, we dial everything back to the way we want it through the rest of the evening, because your eyes have adjusted. And then at midnight or 1 a.m., certain zones get shut down and others stay on for security until dawn.”
Working on the water
One of the most important parts of the overall design was the lighting of the 100-foot-long dock leading from the back of the house. It includes 32 deck lights slightly recessed into alternating pilings to arrive on the pool deck. Beneath the dock are another 32 submersible fixtures controlled separately to illuminate the water below, and one 500-watt fish light for catching bait. Not only did the team have to contend with the tides as they worked, all of the work had to be able to stand up to the weather and water.
“We thought we were going to use a boat to get the lights under the dock, but instead we wound up using a ladder at low tide,” says Deo. Because the dock wasn’t fully installed already, the dock builder was able to leave the infrastructure for Deo’s team to work with. They used pieces of plywood between each platform and worked with the electrician to get conduit run effectively for the installed fixtures.
The experience was similar to working in a trench, except for the open water beneath them. “There’s a couple screwdrivers down there,” says Deo.
The walk out toward the water starts with recessed marker lights, specifically chosen to keep trip hazards to a minimum, and to avoid opportunities for sand to obscure the light.
The pilings crisscross the dock as it extends out into the water, with the fixtures keeping the overall light manageable but still providing useful safety coverage to the walkway. “It makes a really cool zigzag pattern,” says Deo. The team drilled through the piling to enclose the lead wire and pipe to protect them. Then, using a drill with a forstner bit, they cut a flat surface into the round piling to mount the fixture and keep it completely parallel to the edge of the dock. The fixtures bolted to the bottom of the dock add to the feeling of floating out on the water.
At the end of the dock are two navigational beacons, one red and one green, drilled and sunk into the furthest pilings, just in case the house isn’t visible enough from the water as the clients come across the bay at night.
Lessons learned
From start to completion, the design, construction and installation took 18 months, he says. Deo did a few after-dark walkthroughs to get their reactions and make final adjustments.
“They’re very happy with the entire project,” he says.
“It made a difference, having the ability to really work hand-in-hand with the architect as an equal. It wasn’t that I wasn’t confident before, but with this level of accomplishment, you’re earning a stripe or two with that.”
– Mike Deo, NatureScape Lighting and Audio
Getting to work alongside the architect from the start improved his design’s effectiveness and smoothed over the installation process, Deo says.
“It made a difference, having the ability to really work hand-in-hand with the architect as an equal,” he says. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t confident before, but with this level of accomplishment, you’re earning a stripe or two with that.”
Working with his manufacturers also gave him additional options through his fixtures, as they needed to be able to stand up to handle harsh conditions but also needed to match particular design elements for the clients. Because he was working with such a large order, he was able to get some modifications made for this project.
But the biggest takeaway for Deo was that he and his team learned they were capable of stepping up to a challenging installation and completing it, he says.
“We proved that if we allocate enough time, we can do some really cool stuff that we normally wouldn’t even think about,” says Deo. Beyond that, now his team has this job as a reference point to work from on future projects.
Deo has continued working with the architect from this project on a few others since, and that’s turned a connection into a stronger relationship as well, he says.
“It was a great opportunity and the architect was wonderful. I’m a big believer in professional networks and this is a perfect example of why,” he says. “That’s where the best projects come from.”
