Show Notes:
Style Guide: Chapter 1: Parking Areas
- Section 1.4: Lighting
- 1.4.1 Well-Lit Driveway Examples
- 1.4.2 Product Ideas
Residential Universal Design Specifications: Chapter 1: Parking Areas
- 1.2.4 Evenly lit
- 1.2.5 Automatic lighting activation
Residential Universal Design Specifications: Chapter 2: Entrance Routes
- 2.2.5 Evenly Lit
- 2.2.6 Automatic lighting activation
Transcript:
Sarah: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Good Fit Poor Fit. Our podcast is part of The UD Project, a small business rooted in occupational therapy that looks at how the design of a home environment impacts how well people of different ages and abilities perform everyday activities. We chat about this unique perspective to boost your knowledge and help you consider what can be changed in communities like yours.
Learn more about our work at universaldesign.org.
This episode is part of an ongoing series here on Good Fit Poor Fit. We’re going deep on residential universal design specifications, walking through every major area of the home with an occupational therapy lens. Along the way, you’ll hear stories about real people. Whose lives are shaped by the design choices we discuss.
Whether you are a rehab therapist, a designer, a builder, or someone thinking [00:01:00] ahead about your own home, this series is built for you. Start with episode 107 for the full picture. A good fit doesn’t happen by accident. Let’s get into it.
Sarah: Hello, Good Fit Poor Fit listeners, and welcome back for another episode. We are slowly navigating around the elements of parking areas, talking about all the different tasks we typically do and what elements in the design could be adjusted to make things easier and safer for a wide variety of people.
We’re pointing out things you may not have considered and giving you possible solutions at different price ranges to consider for your space or someone you know.
Rebecca: And today’s episode is no different than the other ones we’ve had in this series. We’ll be talking about something that often gets overlooked but is a game changer for function. Picture the end of a long day. You pull into your driveway, you put the car in park, and you sit there for a second before you get out. A lot of people don’t necessarily have [00:02:00] to think about what happens next. You just get out of the car, and you walk to the door. Maybe you’re carrying groceries, maybe it’s raining, maybe you got home later than you expected, and it’s totally dark outside. Now, I want you to picture that same moment, but the lights don’t come on. No porch light, no path lighting, nothing that responds to you pulling in. The only light around you comes from a single fixture mounted above your house, which, if you parked at the right angle, lights the roof of your car nicely, but the path to your front door is completely in shadow.
Sarah: And then picture a slightly different version of this same situation. You’re not arriving at your own home, you’re arriving at someone else’s. Maybe it’s a client, maybe it’s a family member, maybe it’s just a friend who forgot you were coming. The porch light isn’t on. You get out of the car and you’re navigating toward the door you’ve maybe even come to once or twice on a path you have not memorized, over a surface you can’t read clearly because there is no light on it. [00:03:00] Your own home you can probably manage on muscle memory. This one you generally cannot. For most people, both of those situations are an inconvenience. You figure it out, but figure it out is doing a lot of work and the gap between a path you know and a path you’re guessing at is where things go wrong.
We’ve been talking in the last couple episodes about what it takes to get from your car to your front door, the surface underfoot, the space around your vehicle. But today we’re looking at what happens when the sun goes down and what the lighting standard actually asks for, and why it asks for it.
Rebecca: So this kind of scenario that we’re talking about here is actually something I’ve heard quite a lot about recently, but in the context of rental homes like Airbnbs or VRBOs. The idea of arriving somewhere that you aren’t familiar with and without a lot of visibility can be at best challenging and at worst dangerous. This actually happened to me recently when I was [00:04:00] visiting a house in a remote area on the coast of Maine. It was really late. We’d been driving for nine and a half hours, and we were, according to the GPS, getting very close to the house, except we were on gravel roads with no lights. And the house was so tucked in the woods and with so little external lighting, we really weren’t sure where we were headed and if we were even on an actual road. This is a bit of an extreme example, but you get the point. Navigating a dark or unevenly lit or unfamiliar path can be physically and cognitively demanding, whether you’re in a car or on foot or using some sort of mobility device. This is something that we talk about a lot in clinical practice because in a lot of scenarios, adding good lighting to any area really can change the situation a lot and can be the difference between someone doing something independently or needing help. And this is definitely true for the exterior approach to a home. So when an OT does a home visit and they’re thinking about the exterior approach, lighting is always one of the things they want to [00:05:00] assess at the right time of day. This often means asking clients to describe it, because most visits happen during the day, and the lighting picture at 5:00 PM in November is very different from what it is at two o’clock in the afternoon in July. Pretty consistently, when asked about lighting between where they arrive home to the front door, people describe a single point of light that doesn’t actually cover the whole path. And here’s why that matters. Walking from a car to the most accessible entrance is not one task. It’s a sequence of tasks. Exiting the vehicle, orienting towards the door, navigating the path, managing anything you’re carrying, locating the keys, locating the door handle, crossing the threshold. That’s kind of just a broad summary of all the steps.
But each one of them has its own demands, and almost all of them get harder in low or uneven light. Foot placement becomes less certain when you can’t see the surface clearly. People with any kind of gait change, any reduced foot clearance, anyone whose proprioception isn’t fully [00:06:00] reliable, they’re working harder in the dark to make up for what they can’t see. The cognitive demand goes up. They’re devoting more attention to navigation and less to whatever else they’re managing. And then there’s the shadow issue, which is not something we think about a lot, but can be a really big deal. A single source of light, like I described before, at a fixed point, doesn’t just leave some areas dim.
It actually creates contrast, so bright spots and dark spots right next to each other. And that contrast makes dark areas harder to perceive than pure, even dim light would. And it can make a perfectly flat pathway look like it has a drop-off when it doesn’t
Sarah: This is exactly why my mom carries a flashlight in her purse or has her phone with the flashlight button in an easy-to-remember location. She’s preparing for the unexpected and doesn’t want to trip on something and end up on the ground. And it’s not just uneven surfaces like we chatted about in our last episode.
It’s a fallen branch [00:07:00] that’s unexpectedly there, a kid’s toy, or a garden hose. There’s a lot of unexpected, and if it’s in the shadow, it’s even worse. This is also where I think this specification is really important, that a lot of lighting decisions don’t account for.
The standard isn’t just is there a light? It’s two things: Is the area evenly lit, and does the lighting activate automatically? Those are separate requirements, and they’re both important for different reasons. Even lighting means multiple sources positioned to eliminate those shadow zones. We suggest even illumination for parking and approach areas specifically to any door, not just a fixture somewhere in the vicinity, but coverage across the full area where people are moving.
That changes the design conversation considerably because a single overhead fixture at the top of the house or a single pole light is almost always going to fall short of [00:08:00] even illumination.
Rebecca: Right. And the indirect lighting piece is worth discussing a bit. The recommendation in our specifications is that lighting be positioned to illuminate the path without shining directly into a person’s eyes. This sounds obvious, but a lot of exterior fixture placements do exactly the wrong thing. They have lights mounted close to someone’s height, and this creates good coverage right under the light fixture, but it shines directly at someone approaching from a specific angle.
So low ground lighting along the sides of a pathway that are aimed down at the surface rather than at the person is a much more functional choice. It defines the route without creating glare. You’re reading the path, not squinting into the light. And this is why you see some of those little path lights that look like they almost have little hats on them, so they can angle the light down towards the path instead of in someone’s eye.
Sarah: That’s a really good description, those little hats. There is actually a term we picked up [00:09:00] from a lighting designer who we worked with a while back that I think about every time I see a fixture mounted at eye level near maybe like a front door, like those two lights, surrounding the front door.
He calls them glare bombs. These are bare bulbs, clear glass fixtures where you can see the filament directly, anything that projects light straight out at the person approaching them, rather than up, down, or into a diffusing cover. He described it as basically as the same experience as oncoming headlights.
Your eyes can’t adjust because the source is too direct and too harsh, and the contrast between that brightness and the shadows around it makes everything harder to pick out in the environment. Multiple recessed or can fixtures placed evenly in the ceiling of porches or carports aimed downward eliminate the direct source entirely.
You see the illuminated surface and not the bulb. Fixtures that diffuse up and down rather than projecting [00:10:00] outward give you spread without the assault on your eyes and gets you light where you need it. Even choosing fixtures with a frosted finish on the glass helps reduce the intensity.
Rebecca: And the population that benefits from even coverage is broader than most people expect. It includes anyone with low vision, and low vision covers a lot of territory, from macular degeneration to diabetic retinopathy to age-related changes that haven’t been formally diagnosed. It includes people with vestibular conditions who rely more on visual input for balance. It includes people navigating with a mobility device who need to be able to see the path far enough ahead of time to course-correct if needed. But really, it includes most people at certain moments. Anyone who’s navigating while fatigued or distracted or carrying something that shifts their center of gravity. Anyone arriving home after an overnight shift or in the winter when the sun has gone down before they even got out of work. The low-light exterior approach is a tough environment that [00:11:00] a lot of home designs treat as an afterthought. In other scenarios, home designs can treat the lighting issue as a more is always better situation, and that’s pretty misguided actually. We’ve probably all been in situations where there’s too much lighting and there’s a lot of glare off the windows, off the ground, off the hood of the car. And this kind of glare-heavy exterior lighting actually typically reduces visibility as compared to lower intensity, but even lighting. All this to say brighter is not always better. And brightness isn’t even the only factor at play here. Actually, there’s another piece to the story that’s really important, and that’s the automatic activation component of the specs. This might sound like a convenience feature, but actually that really is not the case.
Sarah: Yes. Automatic activation means that the light responds to arrival. So this could be motion sensing, maybe a timer is set, so there are timer-based systems that [00:12:00] activate at dusk, solar-activated features, smart switches that can be triggered remotely, maybe from your phone before you exit the car. All of these are very popular solutions, and I feel like are becoming even less expensive these days.
And they all serve the same function. The path is lit when you need it to be without requiring much additional action from you at the moment, you’re most likely to need your attention on that path itself.
Rebecca: Yes. So the reason that this automation piece is so critical is because a light that needs to be manually activated requires you to be able to see well enough to get there to turn it on, right? So think about a time when you’ve had to go into a room in the dark without knowing where the light switch is. That can be dangerous because you have to walk in and kind of poke around hoping to feel the light switch. It’s the same idea here, where you’ll either have to poke around and try and find the switch once you’ve parked and are getting close to the house, or you’ve had to remember to turn [00:13:00] the light on before you left and knowing that it would be dark when you got back. I’m a planner, but even that feels like a lot in my book, and you don’t always even know when you’re gonna get home, so that strategy is kind of flawed.
Sarah: Yeah, I’m the same way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten to leave the pole light on or the front porch light on. So these timers and remote activation systems are really great. So if you have been following along in our episodes in order, you may remember Walter and his wife from our last episode when we talked about parking and pathway surfaces.
But if you don’t remember, Walter is 72, retired, and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few years ago. He lives with his wife, Carol, in a home that they’ve been in for about 25 years.
Rebecca: And when we talked about Walter last time, we focused on the surface he navigates, the flagstone set in pea gravel that Carol chose for the look of it, and that Walter navigates carefully every time he goes in or out. His [00:14:00] symptoms are manageable, but his gait has changed as his disease has progressed. He moves more deliberately now, and his foot clearance is reduced in a way that makes uneven surfaces a bit higher stake.
Sarah: This week I want to talk about Walter at night though, and if you remember, his wife, Carol, is starting to notice changes, but neither of them are talking about them, which is a very sensitive topic. So Walter comes home from his late afternoon walk after dinner. He’s kept this habit from even before he was retired, even though his pace has slowed a little bit.
It’s getting dark earlier now, and by the time he’s back in the driveway, the light is gone from the sky. There is a porch light above the front door on a switch inside the house that Carol usually turns on when she hears the door. But on the nights she’s on the phone or in the back of the house doing the laundry or has just lost track of time, the [00:15:00] porch light isn’t on when Walter comes back up the walk, and that’s a problem.
The porch light, when it is on, is a single fixture centered above the door. It does a reasonable job illuminating the stoop. The flagstone path from the driveway to the stoop, however, is mostly in shadow.
Walter does know the path. He’s walked it thousands of times, but he just can’t see it well right now.
Rebecca: So the scenario Sarah’s mapped here is a great example of where the interaction between the person and the environment are just really not a great fit. So when those challenges collide with this dark area and the uneven surface, it’s just a mismatch.
Walter does not have the support he needs to navigate safely. The environment is demanding too much of him in that moment.
Sarah: And what’s worth noticing about Walter’s situation is that the daytime picture and the nighttime picture look very different, like we were discussing before. An OT doing a daytime home visit is going to see the flagstone path and have something to say about that [00:16:00] regarding surface stability. But a visit in daylight probably doesn’t surface the lighting problem because the lighting problem doesn’t exist in the daylight.
The evening arrival, which is when Walter is actually even more at risk , is essentially invisible in a standard assessment unless you specifically ask about it, especially when the time changes and it gets darker sooner in the fall and the winter months. Now, Walter is only one of the people we will be dropping in on today.
We have one more person to introduce you to. His name is Marcus, and he’s forty-one, and he’s been Deaf since birth. He lives with his hearing partner and their two teenage children. His identity is grounded in Deaf culture. He navigates the hearing world fluently and doesn’t frame his deafness in the way a clinician’s diagnostic frame might suggest.
What he does have is a home that was built for people who hear things. The doorbell is audible only. When someone arrives, he doesn’t know [00:17:00] unless someone in the house tells him or one of his kids has thought to flash the lights. His teenagers have worked out a system. It shouldn’t have to be a system, though.
When Marcus pulls into his driveway, he’s doing what everybody does. He’s reading the environment for information. A light that activates is information. It’s not just illumination for the path. It’s telling him something has changed. It’s a signal that something is happening outside. For Marcus, automatic exterior lighting that responds to his arrival or to someone else’s arrival is a security feature.
It’s an awareness feature. It’s one of the ways a home can communicate what’s happening outside without depending on sound.
Rebecca: Yes, I love this example, and this conversation is gonna come up again in another episode when we get into doorbells and visual alert systems. But for now, let’s just flag that automatic lighting is one of the few exterior features that serve the people both, in both of the scenarios we just discussed, even though they’re vastly [00:18:00] different. So now let’s talk about what you can actually do here, and we’ll go through this in three layers the way that we typically do. The things that cost little to nothing, things in the mid-range, and things that are more at the structural level. And I’ll say upfront that lighting is one of the categories where the no and low-cost options are more powerful than you might expect. This isn’t a situation where the only real answer is a full electrical overhaul. So the first tier helps us think about what we can do right now without a contractor and without significant expenses. Timer-based plugin fixtures are an entry point. If you have an exterior outlet, and many homes do, a plugin fixture with a built-in timer or dusk-to-dawn sensor can be placed to add coverage where your current lighting falls short. These are available for under forty dollars in many cases and require no wiring to work. Solar powered pathway lights are in this category as well. The technology has improved considerably in recent years, and a set of solar pathway [00:19:00] fixtures installed along the approach route will provide low ground lighting that defines the path edge, exactly the indirect surface-aimed illumination we described. They charge during the day and activate at dusk automatically. No wiring. Effective product options are widely available, and the cost per fixture has come down a lot recently. You’re looking at ten to thirty dollars per fixture for products that actually get the job done. We actually have these in our side and backyard, and they’re pretty easy to set up and maintain.
We just sometimes have to straighten them out after high winds or big rains. But we installed them about eighteen months ago, and they’re still going strong. Smart bulbs and smart switches in existing fixtures are also a low-cost entry point. If you already have a working porch light or garage fixture, replacing the bulb with a smart bulb lets you activate it at a scheduled time or control it remotely, including from the car before you exit. That addresses the automatic activation requirement with existing hardware. Smart bulbs can run from ten to twenty-five dollars, [00:20:00] and a smart switch, if you wanna go that route, can run twenty to sixty dollars and can control multiple fixtures.
Sarah: Yeah, we use a lot of these around our home, even in the backyard when we’re taking the dog out to go to the bathroom in the evening, and they’re so helpful. And for Marcus’s household specifically, a smart feature that activates when his car pulls in would be really ideal. There are driveway alert systems that trigger inside the house as well as exterior notifications.
We’ll get into those at another time. But it is really cool what you were just describing, Rebecca, about what technology is popping up in the mainstream market to work for everyone. But specifically help someone who is Deaf or hard of hearing or has low vision being able to navigate and be alerted for different types of situations.
I think a lot of this is just more financially accessible than it was before. The mid-range, where we’re gonna jump into next, is where you’re gonna maybe involve an electrician, [00:21:00] but not doing the structural work. This is targeted electrical work adds meaningful upgrades to the system you already have.
Adding motion sensor fixtures to existing exterior locations is the most common mid-range upgrade. If you already have a wired fixture above the garage or at the front entry, replacing it with a motion-activated feature is a relatively straightforward swap. The wiring is already there.
The fixture itself runs a little more, $30 to $100, depending on the quality and design. Adding new wired fixtures at locations that don’t currently have them is a bigger mid-range project, most likely requiring an electrician. If the pathway from the parking area to any door, has no hardwired coverage, just darkness between a garage light and a porch light, adding one or two hardwired fixtures with motion sensors and positioning them to light the path surface gives you even coverage that doesn’t depend on battery maintenance or [00:22:00] sunlight.
Plan on $200 to $600 per fixture, depending on the location, the complexity of running the wire, and labor rates for that electrician. For most homes, one or two well-positioned additions make a significant difference.
Rebecca: And the style guide’s coverage of this chapter in the parking area section includes specific product examples, motion sensor fixtures in a range of finishes and styles. If you’re looking for more options that don’t read as purely utilitarian, there’s a real variety available. A wall-mounted lantern style fixture with a built-in motion sensor looks the same as any other exterior feature would until the sun goes down.
Sarah: Another idea is low voltage landscape lighting installed professionally, and that’s also in this range. An electrician can install a coordinated system of path lights, step lights, and directional fixtures that run on a single low voltage transformer. This gives you the [00:23:00] even surface aimed coverage the spec describes, plus professional placement that accounts for those shadow zones we’ve been mentioning.
The cost ranges considerably by scope. A basic pathway system might run five hundred to fifteen hundred installed, and a full exterior approach system is gonna be more.
Rebecca: Yes, and if you’re interested in something of this nature, there are actually landscape electricians who specialize in this type of project. It can be helpful to work with someone or at least speak with someone who’s familiar with how to design exterior lighting. They can help you eliminate shadowed areas in addition to considering wiring capacity. At the structural level, you may be planning the lighting system during design or as part of a large renovation. A designed exterior lighting plan with hardwired fixtures at every key point, the parking area, the pathway edges, the landing, and the entry built into the electrical plan from the start costs a fraction of what retrofitting equivalent coverage costs later. [00:24:00] The fixtures themselves don’t change. The labor is dramatically less when the conduit is going in before the walls close. The conversation with a builder or designer at this stage is about coverage zones, not just fixture count. Where are the shadow zones in the proposed design? Is there a single dominant feature that creates a bright or dark contrast rather than even coverage? Is there a motion zone that covers both the parking area and the full path to the door, or does someone arrive in motion sensor territory and then walk into an area that the sensor doesn’t cover?
Sarah: Yes, all of those details are great to work out with, one of those electricians or a landscape designer.
At the design stage, adding a dusk-to-dawn exterior circuit, a dedicated circuit for exterior pathway, and area lighting that activates on a sensor or timer is a design decision that costs almost nothing in the framing stage.
Tying parking area lighting, pathway lightning, and landing lighting into a single [00:25:00] automatic circuit means that the whole system can respond together. That’s the ideal for Walter. The path is lit before he’s walking on it. And for Marcus, there’s a consistent visual signal that something outside is active.
Rebecca: The other structural consideration worth naming is placement logic. Exterior fixtures mounted very high above the garage door at peak height on a two-story facade provide coverage directly below them and really not much else. Lower mounted fixtures or fixtures at multiple heights give you more useful distribution of light, and this is where the glare bomb problem is most preventable. At the design stage, the fixture type is a specification choice. Retrofitting a glare-heavy fi-fixture that’s already hardwired and mounted at eye level next to someone’s front door is a much more involved conversation than selecting a more even fixture from the get-go. This is a planning decision, not a costly one, but someone has to think about it at the [00:26:00] design stage
Sarah: I think you bring up a good point. There’s different levels of lighting from lower to the ground, kind of mid-range, and up at the top of your house. They all need to be considered. So what can we take away from this episode? Exterior lighting is one of the few categories where the gap between good and poor design is almost invisible during the hours when most people look at the homes.
You tour a house on a Saturday afternoon, you walk the path from the driveway to the door, and you form an impression, and that impression is entirely disconnected from that same path at seven thirty on a Tuesday in the evening in February when you’ve picked up a kid from practice and your arms are full, and it’s twenty-eight degrees outside.
The actionable thing for anyone listening who is in a home right now, go look at your parking area and your approach path after dark. Note where the shadows are. You’re just observing here. Note where the light responds to your arrival or waits for you to flip a switch [00:27:00] inside.
Note whether there are any fixtures projecting light directly at your eyes rather than down at the path. That observation will tell you more than any other daytime assessment. For OTs and healthcare professionals, exterior lighting after dark is a specific question worth asking during a home assessment.
Building it into the intake or specifically asking the client to document their arrival experience in the evening closes that gap, that’s often easy to miss. For builders and designers, even lighting that activates automatically is a two-part standard: coverage and automation. A single motion sensor fixture at the garage satisfies neither if the pathway to the door is still in the shadow. And fixture type matters. A glare bomb next to the front door is a design choice with consequences. The pathway needs to be lit, the coverage needs to reach the full approach, and the design stage investment to get there is minimal.
Rebecca: And for anyone who finds themselves in the [00:28:00] Marcus conversation, thinking about how a home where visual information matters for reasons beyond low vision, the automatic activation piece isn’t separate from the accessibility conversation. It’s part of the same design conversation. A light that responds to arrival is a light that communicates.
For some households, that communication is the actual point of the light. Next week, though, we’re gonna move from lighting to the geometry of the path itself, the width, the slope, the cross slope, and what the numbers mean in practice. If you’ve ever had the experience of pushing someone with wheels on a surface that seemed perfectly flat and then really wasn’t, that’s what we’re gonna be talking about next week. You can find the survey and specifications at universaldesign.org if you wanna explore a bit more of what we’re talking about in these episodes. The survey walks you through your exterior approach, and the lighting questions are in section one. Thanks for being with us, listeners, and we’ll be back soon.
Sarah: Thanks for listening to Good Fit Poor Fit. If you want to learn more… first, find more episodes with transcripts and show [00:29:00] notes at goodfitpoorfit.com. Don’t forget to subscribe! Second, check out our courses at universaldesign.org.
We cover housing topics like advocacy, collaboration, home modification, universal design and task adaptations. Lastly, if you have questions or topics you’d like us to discuss, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for fitting us into your day.
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