Written by Chris Bond, a lighting professional with 18 years of industry experience
This is the "make it beautiful" side of exterior lighting — the decorative work people actually search for, sitting alongside the more technical guides on this site. It deserves the same standard of real detail: actual spacing numbers, actual mounting methods, and an honest read on what looks premium versus what looks cheap.
Spacing: in practice, festoon spacing typically runs 50cm to 100cm between globes, depending on the size of the space and the mounting height — a wider working range than the generic "30–50cm" figure often quoted, because the right spacing genuinely depends on the specific site. Tighter spacing (toward the 30–50cm end) gives a warm, even glow well suited to smaller courtyards; wider spacing (60cm+) gives a more minimal, architectural look but needs careful run planning to avoid dark patches.
Catenary wire: for spans over roughly 8 metres, or any exposed or windy site, run a separate galvanised steel support wire rather than relying on the festoon cable itself to carry the load. This is a common corner cut on budget installs, and it ages badly — the cable stretches and sags unevenly over time, and the fixings take load they were never meant to carry.
Sag: leave genuine sag in the run — roughly a 1:50 sag-to-span ratio is the practical guide — to absorb thermal expansion and wind movement. Pulling festoon drum-tight looks neat on install day and fails at the end fixings within a season, once the cable has nowhere left to give.
Mounting height: minimum 2.1–2.4m clearance over anywhere people actually walk underneath.
IP rating: IP44 minimum for covered or sheltered outdoor areas, IP65 preferred for anything fully exposed to rain. The connection points and joiners are the actual weak link in most festoon runs — not the cable itself — so they need the same rating as the cable, or better, not a lesser one.
The same IP-rating logic applies as festoon — IP44 minimum generally, IP65 near pools, spas or anywhere fully exposed. Low-voltage systems are the standard, and effectively required approach, anywhere near pools, spas or other wet areas.
Connection points are again the most vulnerable part of the installation — the same lesson as the cable-join content in our in-ground fittings guide, worth reading alongside this one rather than repeating in full here.
3-channel (red/green/blue). Cheapest option, but "white" is only ever a mix of the three colours — it reads slightly blue or muddy rather than a clean white.
4-channel — adds a dedicated white diode alongside RGB, giving a genuinely clean white in addition to colour. Better choice if the fitting needs to do both everyday warm white and colour well.
5-channel — adds tunable white (warm-to-cool) on top of RGB. The most flexible option, and usually the most expensive.
Control protocols, in plain terms: DMX is the right choice for large-scale, precisely synced commercial or architectural jobs. Zigbee, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mesh systems suit residential smart control via an app — worth a word of caution here about proprietary apps and ecosystem lock-in before specifying a smart system for a client, since not every platform ages equally well or stays supported.
Ground-mounted fixtures positioned roughly 0.3–1.8m (1–6ft) from the trunk depending on tree size, aimed upward at 30–45° into the canopy. Dramatic, and well suited to a feature or specimen tree the design wants to draw the eye toward.
Fixtures mounted high in the canopy, aimed downward, mimicking natural moonlight filtering through branches. Soft, dappled shadow on the ground below — especially effective over patios, seating areas and paths. Less "look at this tree," more ambient mood for the space underneath it.
Fixture wattage and beam angle: honestly, this depends on the job — canopy size, tree height and the desired effect all shift the right answer, and there's no fixed formula that holds across different trees. That's worth stating plainly rather than forcing a false-precision table onto something that genuinely needs to be assessed per tree — and it's itself a useful thing to know, since it's exactly where generic guides quoting a fixed number regardless of the actual tree tend to get it wrong.
Colour systems, festoon runs and tree lighting all benefit from a proper plan before the first fitting goes in. I work at Solstice Lighting, design/spec/supply for Victorian projects.
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