There's a moment in every exterior lighting project, usually late evening, on-site, when the scheme comes on for the first time, where you either feel it or you don't.
After 23 years of designing and installing outdoor lighting schemes, we know what that moment should feel like. And we know that the product you specify has everything to do with whether it arrives.
That's why Hunza has been at the centre of our design work since 2003. Not as a default. Not as a convenience. As a considered, repeated choice made by a team of lighting designers and specialist exterior electricians who have seen enough schemes succeed, and enough fail, to know the difference.
Designing with Light, Not Just Placing It
Exterior lighting design is not a product selection exercise. It's a spatial discipline. The question isn't which fitting looks good in a brochure, it's how light behaves in a specific place, at a specific time of night, across every season of a British year.
We design schemes that work with the landscape rather than imposing on it. That means understanding how moonlight falls across a lawn in winter, how a copper fitting will weather over five years in a coastal garden, how the eye adapts as it moves from a lit terrace into darker planting beyond. These are the things that separate a lighting scheme that photographs well from one that genuinely transforms how a space is experienced after dark.
Hunza gives our designers the tools to make those decisions with precision. The range is broad enough to handle every application in a single scheme, from tree uplighting to step illumination, wall washing to underwater pool lighting, and coherent enough that the results feel unified rather than assembled.
The Brief Behind the Fitting
Every project we take on starts not with a product conversation but with a place conversation. What does this garden feel like at dusk? What should draw the eye first? Where does the client spend their evenings? What should disappear into the architecture by day and reveal itself after dark?
The answers shape the specification. A listed stone facade calls for a different approach than a contemporary glass extension. A coastal garden with salt air and exposed ground demands different materials than a sheltered urban courtyard. A scheme designed around a Lutron or Crestron smart home system needs to integrate at the driver level, not just the switch.
Hunza's range is built with enough depth and material variety, marine-grade 316L stainless steel, solid copper, powder coat in a full range of colours, that we can match the right fitting to the right brief every time. And because every component is individually replaceable, the specification we make today will still be performing in twenty years, upgraded rather than replaced as technology moves on.
Low Voltage, by Design
One of the things that most clearly defines our approach and distinguishes a specialist exterior lighting installation from a general electrical job, is our commitment to low voltage systems throughout.
We do not install 230V mains voltage for landscape lighting. This is a design decision as much as a safety one.
Low voltage cabling gives us flexibility that mains installation simply cannot match. Fitting positions aren't locked in by conduit runs laid weeks before the planting is in place. We can adjust, finesse, and respond to the actual conditions of a site during installation, moving a spike-mounted spot six inches to find the angle that makes a tree come alive, rather than accepting the position a plan dictated. That flexibility is visible in the finished scheme. It's the difference between lighting that feels considered and lighting that feels placed.
The safety case is equally clear. Gardens are not static environments. Ground shifts. Roots move. Landscaping work happens years after an installation, by people who may have no knowledge of what lies beneath. A 12V system carries no risk in that situation. A 230V cable does. Our clients invest seriously in their exterior spaces. We take the same approach to the infrastructure beneath them.
Control: Where Design Meets Technology
The best exterior lighting scheme is only as good as the system that brings it to life. Over 23 years we have integrated Hunza installations with every major control platform used in premium residential and commercial projects across the UK.
For clients with whole-home Lutron systems, exterior lighting becomes part of the same scene architecture as interior spaces a single gesture transitions the entire property from afternoon to evening mode, inside and out. The dimmability of Hunza's PURE LED range integrates cleanly with Lutron's DALI and 0-10V protocols, giving our designers the full palette of light levels to work with.
Crestron and Control 4 environments allow exterior lighting to respond to security triggers, occupancy sensing, time-of-day schedules, and scene control within a unified automation ecosystem. We have delivered schemes where the garden literally comes alive as the client arrives home, and settles into a quieter mood as the evening progresses, all without a single manual adjustment.
Rako offers an elegant wireless dimming solution for retrofit projects or listed buildings where additional cabling would be impractical. KNX is our preferred platform for larger commercial and institutional projects, where open-standard interoperability matters. And for clients who want intelligent control without committing to a full proprietary platform, IP-based systems like Shelly provide scheduled switching, sunrise/sunset automation, and remote access via app at a fraction of the cost.
The control system is part of the design. We specify it that way from the outset.
From Private Gardens to Award-Winning Institutional Schemes
The majority of our work is residential, private gardens, driveways, and exterior spaces for homeowners who want their property to feel as considered after dark as it does by day. But the same principles apply at any scale.
Our exterior lighting scheme at Dulwich College, one of London's most prestigious independent schools, was recognised with a lighting design award. The brief demanded something that would perform in a high-footfall institutional environment, require minimal maintenance, and sit respectfully within a campus that spans historic and contemporary architecture across a significant site. Hunza met every element of that brief. The same fittings, the same low voltage approach, the same attention to how light behaves in space, scaled up, but not compromised.
That project is a useful reference point for what exterior lighting design can be at its most demanding. The questions it asked, about longevity, about maintenance, about the relationship between fittings and architecture, are the same questions we ask on every project, at every scale.
What Working with Us Looks Like
We are not a lighting supplier with an installation arm. We are a specialist design and installation practice, with in-house lighting designers and directly employed exterior electricians, who happen to stock the products we specify.
That matters because it changes the nature of the relationship. When we specify a Hunza fitting, we're specifying it because we've installed it, maintained it, and stood behind it for over two decades. When we design a scheme, we design it knowing we'll be the ones on-site making it work. And when we hand a project over, we take full responsibility for everything we've delivered.
If you're planning an exterior lighting project, whether a private garden, a development, or a commercial or institutional scheme, we'd welcome the conversation.
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