Our Focus Is Not Correct in Landscape Lighting

By Patrick Harders, Co-Founder of Sterling Lighting, Lighting Certified (LC), 25+ years in the field, 10,000+ systems installed

For years, much of the lighting industry, from manufacturers to specifiers to designers, has focused its energy on one primary pursuit: efficiency.

We’ve seen the race:

• Higher lumens per watt

• Smarter controls

• Lower power consumption

And while these goals are important and technically impressive, I believe we’ve lost sight of something more fundamental, something more human.

The Real Goal: Lighting for People

At Sterling Lighting, our passion from day one has been rooted in a simple idea: create perfect white light. Not just the brightest. Not just the most efficient. But the most visually accurate, comfortable, and natural.

Why? Because lighting isn’t just about illumination, it’s about perception. It’s about how we experience the space around us.

And that starts with white light fidelity.

The Problem with Chasing Numbers

Lumens per watt is easy to measure. Color rendering? Not so much. That’s part of the reason the industry defaulted to metrics that look great on paper but often look poor in reality.

We’ve all seen high-output LEDs that distort skin tones, flatten foliage, or make a beautifully painted door look like a completely different shade. That’s what happens when efficiency becomes the end goal instead of a constraint within a bigger vision.

Here’s the truth: great light isn’t necessarily the brightest light, it’s the right light.

What We Mean by Human-Centric Lighting

Human-centric lighting puts color fidelity and visual comfort back at the forefront. That means developing light sources that render reds, greens, and blues accurately. It means eliminating harsh spectral spikes and filling in the gaps in the visible spectrum, especially where the human eye is most sensitive.

It’s not just about CRI (Color Rendering Index). It’s about TM-30 fidelity, about spectral distribution, and about creating white light that actually mimics sunlight, not just imitates its color temperature.

When Light Feels Better, Less Is More

Here’s the counterintuitive part that most lighting specifiers miss: when the quality of light is right, when it feels balanced and natural, you don’t need as much of it.

Our eyes respond better to full-spectrum, high-fidelity lighting. It creates depth. It improves contrast. It gives definition to textures and surfaces without overpowering them. In essence, it allows designers to do more with less.

The Sterling Standard

From the beginning, we’ve engineered our luminaires to do one thing above all else: render white light beautifully. Every optic, every LED module, every driver has been selected or designed with that goal in mind.

It’s the reason we’ve resisted chasing industry fads or specs that compromise visual quality in pursuit of wattage or marketing metrics.

When you’re on a jobsite, standing there with the client, and you flip the system on, that first impression matters. Great lighting doesn’t shout. It whispers with clarity, creating calm, inviting spaces that feel better, not just look brighter.

Let’s Refocus

To elevate this industry, we need to change the conversation. Let’s start asking better questions:

• Does this luminaire render colors faithfully?

• Does this light source reduce visual fatigue?

• Does it make the space feel natural, calm, or inspiring?

If the answer is yes, then it’s doing more than lighting, it’s serving people.

And that’s the future we’re building at Sterling Lighting.

Takeaway:

The real innovation isn’t more lumens per watt, it’s better light per person. That’s what we’ve been chasing for over two decades, and it’s what we’ll keep chasing until every design looks right, feels right, and performs right.