AOLP supports professional lighting designers and installers by establishing professional standards regarding ethics and certifications, as well as providing valuable networking opportunities that benefit the entire industry and, ultimately, the consumer.

The association’s mission is a reflection of the industry’s supportive culture. “The lighting industry is, from what I understand, fairly unique in the fact that we’re all very willing to share our trade secrets,” says Andy Thomas, CLVLT, COLD, AOLP President and the owner of Viewpoint Lighting. “We want more people to be doing it right, versus figuring out the right way and then not letting anybody know how you’re doing it. I think our lighting association is very open to new ideas and to sharing, disseminating those ideas to our membership to make sure that everybody’s getting all the up to date, trending information.”

AOLP is also eager to share news and information with the construction community at large. The association recently released its State of the Industry Report, so Construction in Focus sat down with Mr. Thomas for more details on the latest trends, challenges, and the future of the industry as outlined in the document.

Ongoing growth
The outdoor lighting industry had enjoyed increased growth worldwide over the last 12 to 24 months. The pandemic drove this expansion as people sought to improve their outdoor spaces. Property owners turned their attention outside in order to create a pleasant refuge for themselves during stressful times and for socially distanced entertaining. Outdoor lighting professionals were booked months in advance to keep up with demand, Thomas says, pointing out that, “People weren’t traveling. They were putting money into their houses.”

The dramatic boom has leveled out now that people have more choices on how to spend their money. “I think it has peaked,” says Thomas. “[There is] that pent up demand for people to get out of their house and go back on vacation.”

Even so, the sector remains remarkably strong and the overall growth is expected to continue, even if it might be at a somewhat slower pace. There are still backlogs in backyard construction projects and, after enjoying outdoor spaces during the pandemic, consumers are eager to continue to make the most of those spaces.

Industry trends
Multiple trends are gaining popularity within the industry. One of the top new trends is the automation of lighting controls and home system integration. Consumers want convenient solutions, from dimmable lighting to digital control of lighting systems. They want to easily manage their lighting systems themselves, rather than relying on timers.

Architectural lighting is also on the rise. In addition to lighting their outdoor spaces, homeowners want to direct attention to their houses. Colored LED lighting has become a particularly popular way to put focus on the home as well as the outdoor space. “A lot more people are jumping into color changing LED,” Thomas says. “There is certainly a lot of buzz in the last year or so.” Some of this may be due to recent improvements in colored LED lighting. “The capabilities, and the technology, and the fixtures, and the quality—everything is getting better,” he shares.

Color changing lighting has also become popular for pool lighting, as property owners look for a fun, trendy option to light their pool areas. This demand comes alongside an increased demand for pool lighting overall.

Property owners want a more subtle look for their light fixtures, a demand that is made possible by advancing technology. “[There is] continued modularization and shrinking of fixtures because of the LED technology that is coming out and how the actual light source and components that need to go into the fixtures are becoming smaller and smaller,” Thomas explains. “So now we can get the same amount of light out of a smaller fixture, and the big advantage of smaller fixtures is hiding those light sources.”

Another key trend is a push for catenary lighting systems over the popular café-style lighting. There is still consumer demand for café-style lighting, but there is pressure to find alternatives because of light trespass onto neighboring properties. Designers and installers are working hard to introduce property owners to the advantages of catenary lighting systems, which still provide the hanging wire design element of café-style lighting, but use fewer lights and incorporate shrouds and louvers into the design to direct light away from the sky—and the neighbors.

Emerging technology
Outdoor lighting professionals are enjoying the benefits of new and improved software, which assists in everything from designing to scheduling, offering a solution for nearly everyone. Thomas can attest to the advantages himself; since his company switched to a more advanced software option, “it certainly changed how we manage our workflow.”

Solutions range from turnkey to customizable, which may be particularly advantageous to smaller enterprises. “They’ll custom tailor to your business needs and your business structure based on how many employees you have, and office staff, and who’s doing what role,” Thomas says. “I think, for the small business—sole proprietors or small LLCs—having that sort of software at our fingertips certainly helps professionalize what we do. It’s kind of like having office staff part time, doing some of the stuff that we had to do on pencil and paper, or on spreadsheets, or writing notes on napkins.” With these software solutions, small businesses can “really take the organization part of the business to the next level so that we’re not just scrambling around.”

On the design side, “there are a lot of graphics programs that have come out in the last couple of years that help to capture what we want to do in a conceptual design and convey that information to the client in the proposal process,” Thomas explains. The software makes it possible “to take pictures and graphically represent what we want to do in their yard to show them where the fixtures are going, what we’re going to be doing, get our design intent across without setting up a physical demonstration of the lighting.”

This is a vast improvement over the traditional way of demonstrating a conceptual design, which required that the lighting professional “set up a bunch of temporary lights to show the homeowner what it’s going look like in their yard. If we can do that with pictures and not have to drive out and work at night and set up demos and take down demos, [it] makes selling the projects a lot more efficient.”

The future
Some challenges, of course, remain on the horizon as the industry moves forward. Workforce shortages are predicted to continue, so leading companies are investing in existing talent as well as offering extra perks to entice new employees. Supply chain issues continue to pose difficulties for the industry so, when possible, manufacturers, designers, and installers are predicting their needs and purchasing far in advance to prevent delays.

AOLP continues to welcome new members at an increasing rate. “We’ve grown quite a bit in the last few years,” Thomas shares. As numbers expand, so does the association’s reach and positive impact. “As an association, we’ve been pushing certification both on the technical install side and the design side. And we’re really starting to get more and more people interested in the certifications and getting more people through that certification process. It’s sort of a snowball effect; the more people we get certified, the more people want to get certified.” AOLP offers two professional certifications: Certified Low Voltage Lighting Technician (CLVLT) and Certified Outdoor Lighting Designer (COLD).

To be sure, AOLP is well positioned to continue to make a positive impact as the industry navigates future challenges, ensuring that outdoor lighting professionals are fully supported for many years to come.

The post Supporting the Outdoor Lighting Industry<p class="company">Association of Outdoor Lighting Professionals</p> appeared first on Construction In Focus.

Serving Pennsylvania, Delaware, Northern Maryland, and Northern New York, Keystone Custom Decks works closely with each of its clients, completing a 3D rendering of their proposed project to ensure total satisfaction. Founded in 1983 by Amos Esh, this family-owned and operated company features bespoke design for customized outdoor living spaces that meet the needs of each customer.

Now run by sons Michael, Marv, and Tim, Keystone continues to work with talented and experienced craftsmen to ensure the same quality service and exceptional product that has led to an impressive 40 years in business.

“When my father started this business, he built it on the premise of making sure his customers were taken care of,” says Partner Michael Esh. “When we were growing up, even if at times my father would have to take a loss on a job to make sure the customers were happy, he would do that. He was very concerned and very intent on making sure customers were taken care of, and that’s been the backbone of our company for 40 years now—making sure our clients are satisfied and happy with the work done.”

Keystone stands behind its work, providing a lifetime warranty on workmanship. The consistent dedication to ensuring customer satisfaction is also one of the main reasons for its ongoing success, Esh adds.

“Besides that, we’ve always stayed on the cutting edge of the industry, and we’ve always been proactive about recognizing and being ahead of new trends,” he says. Indeed, Keystone is known in the industry, particularly regionally, to be a forward-thinking company that not only recognizes industry advances but introduces new products and styles to the market.

“The third part of our success is our team, which is phenomenal,” says Esh. “They have been a huge part of everything.”

Keystone is also a full-service company, able to handle all aspects of every project it undertakes, from start to finish, in-house. When a client contacts them, Keystone first ensures the project is a good fit for what the company does. From there a salesperson goes to the home for an initial meeting to talk about design, make suggestions, and even help clients who have no idea what they want. The salesperson brings all the information back to the team of in-house designers, who create a 3D rendering with a video walkthrough of the entire project, all of which is done before the customer ever signs a contract.

“The second step is coming into our facility to our showroom where we present them with the 3D design, which is the first time they’re actually seeing the design,” Esh explains. “This gives them a very good visual of what their project will look like, and because their house is put into the rendering as well, they can see in good detail exactly what this project would look like on their house.”

From there, when the client is ready to go ahead, the project moves onto the production site where a team takes care of all permits. There is also a team purchasing necessary products, and when it’s time to start, clients are assigned a project manager.

“Then our crews go out and build the project,” says Esh. “We have our own mason crews, our own excavating crews, and our own pool crew if the project involves a pool. Someone can come to us and say, ‘we want a deck with a covered portion,’ or ‘we want a patio, swimming pool, or outdoor kitchen with electrical and plumbing work’—we handle all of that so they don’t have to work with external contractors or hire their own electrician and plumber to make it happen. We handle the entire project.”

This exceptional level of service is unusual in the industry, he adds, and has led to a lot of positive feedback from customers over the years. “To find a company that does everything for the backyard all under one umbrella is pretty unique.”

Being able to streamline a potentially timely and challenging project is clearly attractive to clients who aren’t interested in being their own general contractor; they just want the project done, and they want someone to handle it all, including coordinating all the scheduling.

This commitment to customer service has also led to impressive growth over the past few years, particularly at the height of COVID lockdowns when so many homeowners and families were forced to not only work from home but live, play, and also make the best of their backyards. Although shutdowns negatively affected many industries, others were able to thrive.

“Anybody who was doing anything with home improvement just had stellar years in 2020, 2021, and into 2022,” says Esh. “People figured out they were going to be home for a while, and they decided to spend money improving their homes. They also figured they probably wouldn’t be doing much traveling and vacations for a couple of years, so people used a good bit of the money typically spent on that to improve their homes.”

Homeowners investing in their living spaces—both indoors and out—created phenomenal growth for Keystone during those couple of years, with demand that was unlike anything the company had seen previously, Esh adds. Fortunately, Keystone was well-positioned to handle it, having moved into a brand-new facility several years prior.

“We had room to expand, we had our showroom set up and built, and we were positioned very well to respond to that increased demand,” Esh shares.

COVID, of course, did impact the supply chain globally, leading to issues obtaining certain materials, colors, and appliances, but Keystone managed to weather the storm.

“It’s leveled out a lot. It’s a lot better than it was,” Esh says. “Suppliers were trying to figure it out, and pricing was all over the map, so there were challenges to work through for a couple of years.”

COVID also changed the employment landscape—perhaps permanently—with more people working both hybrid and completely off-site, so while the demand for home improvement isn’t quite as high these days, it’s still impressive, he adds. And it’s a demand that Keystone will continue to embrace in the upcoming years. As a well-established company with 40 years of experience and a phenomenal team of people, Keystone is able to provide an entire dedicated team on every project from beginning to end.

“It’s not just one guy out of the back of his truck that you might not be able to get hold of,” Esh says. “When you call into our office during business hours, you’ll get an answer from a live person, which is rare. With Keystone, you’re well taken care of.”

This includes a team that works solely on building permits, he emphasizes, something many contractors can’t readily provide as they’re either working on the side, or they’re letting the homeowner take responsibility for it—a stress that isn’t needed. “We have that infrastructure built to take care of our clients from start to finish throughout the process, and I think that’s one of the things that really sets us apart.”

While economic conditions are always a challenge and can certainly affect consumer confidence, Keystone is always looking ahead and staying aware to keep producing its best work no matter the economic climate.

“We’re not trying to sell clients something they can’t afford or that isn’t the right fit for them at the time,” says Esh. “Part of our process is finding the best type of project for them. Is a bigger project or smaller project going to serve their needs better? Those are some of the challenges we address, especially with the uncertain markets right now, where nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

Along with the accomplishment of getting to 40 years in a notoriously challenging industry and growing a knowledgeable and reliable team into the formidable operation it is now, Keystone also has its eyes on some key milestones.

“Doing what we do with excellence has always been our objective, and sometimes that opens up opportunities that we can take advantage of and integrate into our company as far as expansion goes,” says Esh. “So, moving forward, we’ll just keep doing what we do and doing it well. That’s what our goal is.”

The post Backyard Bliss – Building Beauty Close to Home<p class="company">Keystone Custom Decks</p> appeared first on Construction In Focus.

“Outdoor kitchen designs often mirror their indoor counterparts, successfully transitioning the indoors to the outdoors and making use of previously unused outdoor space or repurposing it,” Brown Jordan Outdoor Kitchens describes.

The idea of an outdoor cooking area for one’s living space is hardly new but its identity as an ‘outdoor kitchen’ began a bit more recently. In a piece for The Spruce, Maria Sabella writes about how summer kitchens became popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in more wealthy households.

“Historically, a summer kitchen was a small building, often made from brick or wood, that was located adjacent to the main house,” with cooking usually done in an open fireplace or on a stove, she writes. These versatile spaces kept the cooking heat and smell from affecting the rest of the home. Summer kitchens have also been used to prepare mass quantities of food to be stored for the winter months. Today, the outdoor kitchen and its like are modern interpretations of this idea and are typically geared toward both function and entertainment.

The outdoor kitchen has especially begun to gain steam recently. A trend statement for the year 2021 reported that 90 percent of Americans with outdoor living space now considered that area more valuable than they did before COVID. Another survey revealed that 58 percent of Americans plan to buy at least one new piece of furniture or accessories for outdoor living spaces annually. The report attributes this increase to the after-effect of the pandemic when people worldwide had to deal with quarantine and social distancing regulations and outright lockdowns. This led many people to increase the time they spent outside or in open-air spaces.

It also names millennials, the demographic born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, as entering the general age range where entertaining guests at home is increasingly important. “Over half of millennials (53 percent) will be buying multiple pieces of outdoor furniture [in 2022].” People will be using these outdoor spaces for cooking, relaxation, and socialization, and want their outdoor spaces to be enjoyable and functional, and add value to their homes.

The 2022 Kitchen Trends Index published by Atlas Ceramics, notes that searches for the term ‘outdoor kitchen’ have yielded more than two million annual searches on Google, while videos and posts related to that hashtag saw over 71 million views on TikTok and nearly 500,000 posts on Instagram. The Index adds that outdoor kitchen developments are at the top of the project trends list for the American Institute of Architects.

The increased prevalence of outdoor smart appliances and enhancements, in turn, make the possibility of outdoor kitchens more accessible than ever before. Such enhancements include ambient LED lighting, outdoor televisions, and various grilling and barbeque equipment that can be hooked up to local internet connections, making for as entertaining an experience as most indoor setups.

The outdoor kitchen can take on different forms, depending on what an owner wants. Amanda Lecky for This Old House outlines the three types of outdoor kitchen: movable, usually outfitted with a portable, easy-to-clean grill and rolling storage; prefabricated, “an all-in-one option for folks with more square footage and cash to spend,” with a cooking island, situated grill, and counters, lighting, and accessories; and custom, which is the most flexible of the three options and generally has its own appliances, storage and counter space, and runs larger in terms of square footage.

In a piece for amateur gardening magazine Gardeningetc, Sarah Warwick emphasizes that the best ideas for outdoor kitchens look beyond the cooking of food to allow room for preparation and storage, along with extra appliances like an outdoor oven, sink, or fridge. She suggests that many storage units can often be found at DIY stores or through specialist suppliers. Working with specialist designers, such as garden designers or landscape architects, can help to “create an outdoor kitchen as part of a redesign of the entire garden for a total transformation.”

There are further benefits for homeowners who are looking to take the plunge into a bigger world of outdoor entertainment. Jayme Muller for outdoor kitchen company RTA Outdoor Living affirms that, while individual pieces of an outdoor kitchen will vary in terms of value added to one’s property, “You can expect to receive anywhere from 50 to 200 percent as a return on your investment.”

In a piece outlining the benefits of building an outdoor kitchen, the staff of Brown Jordan Outdoor Kitchens state that homes with these attached can sell for nearly thirty percent more than expected. “Of the nearly four million homes nationwide that sold between January 2016 and December 2017, these outdoor features, amenities and design styles made the largest impact on sale price.” Outdoor kitchens can return 100 to 200 percent of home improvement costs, but the return on investment does depend on other factors such as the value of the home itself and the location.

Although the outdoor kitchen is an increasingly attractive idea to younger homeowners, it is not altogether free from the concerns that the market is seeing right now. RTA Outdoor Living designer Daniel Cdebaca reports that the desire for homeowners to create their own outdoor kitchen or cooking space will likely be stymied by ongoing changes to the global supply chain, shipping delays, inflation, and contractor availability, among other factors.

Although he anticipates that the inflation rate will even out in 2023, this will not provide an instant effect on the economy or overall higher prices of goods. “It’s tough to gauge how elevated pricing will affect the cost of outdoor home improvement and DIY [do-it-yourself] outdoor kitchen projects,” he writes. These factors are always important to consider but should not preclude someone from pursuing this as a new project.

Whether to add value to a home or to take advantage of a renewed interest in being outdoors, whatever your reason for investing in an outdoor kitchen, here’s to another National Grilling Month. May your temperatures be just right and your summertime be relaxing and filled with good food!

The post Bringing The Indoors Out<p class="company">Adding Value With Outdoor Kitchens</p> appeared first on Construction In Focus.