When we talk to clients about outdoor lighting, we often get asked the same question: why do you always come back to Hunza?
After 23 years of designing and installing exterior lighting schemes for private homes, listed buildings, contemporary new builds, and commercial properties including Dulwich College, where our Hunza scheme won a lighting design award, the answer is the same every time. Because nothing else does what Hunza does, in the conditions the UK puts it through, over the timescales that matter.
This isn't a product brochure. It's the perspective of a team of in-house lighting designers and specialist exterior electricians who have been living with these fittings since 2003 not just selling them, but designing with them, installing them, maintaining them, and watching them perform in British gardens year after year.
Why Most Outdoor Lighting Fails
Before we talk about Hunza, it's worth understanding what outdoor lighting is actually up against in this country. The UK is not a forgiving environment for exterior fittings. Freeze-thaw cycles, sustained rainfall, ground movement, coastal salt air, and years of UV exposure will degrade inferior products far faster than most people expect.
We have seen cheap landscape lighting fail within two winters. We have watched mid-range fittings corrode to the point where components cannot be accessed, let alone replaced, within five years of installation. The consequences for a homeowner are not just cosmetic. Dark spots appear in a carefully designed scheme. Ground-mounted fittings require excavation to replace. The product has been discontinued. The finish no longer matches.
The upfront saving becomes an expensive, disruptive problem and one that falls disproportionately on the garden or exterior it was meant to enhance.
This is the context in which we evaluate everything we specify. Longevity is not a luxury. It's the baseline requirement.
What Makes Hunza Different: Engineered for the Outdoors, Built to Last a Lifetime
Hunza is designed, engineered, and hand-assembled in Auckland, New Zealand, a country with a serious outdoor culture and a demanding range of climates to build for. Every fitting in the range is rated to IP66 as a minimum: fully dust-tight and resistant to powerful water jets. Many carry IP67 or IP68 ratings. Our electricians specify these ratings because they rely on them, around pools, in coastal gardens, and in exposed urban rooftop installations where conditions can be severe.
The materials are chosen with the same rigour. Marine-grade 316L stainless steel, the same specification used in marine and surgical applications, is the standard finish for exposed installations. Solid natural copper develops a patina over time that, in a planted garden, becomes indistinguishable from the landscape. Machine-grade alloys with UV-stable powder coat finishes in black, bronze, and a range of other colours complete the offering, giving our designers genuine flexibility without compromising structural integrity.
But the single most important characteristic of a Hunza fitting, the one that matters most over a twenty-year horizon, is that every component is individually replaceable. The LED engine, the driver, the lens, the body fixings. All of it can be serviced and updated in place, without removing the fitting from the ground or the wall.
In an era when most products are engineered for disposal, this is a fundamental statement of values. A Hunza fitting installed in 2003 can be upgraded to current LED technology today. The fitting you specify this year will still be performing when your garden has matured around it. For clients who are investing seriously in their exterior spaces, this is not a minor detail. It is the whole argument.
The Range: A Fitting for Every Application
One of the reasons Hunza has remained central to our design work for over two decades is the breadth and coherence of the range. A considered exterior lighting scheme rarely involves a single product type. Depending on the project, we might be combining tree uplighting, pathway lighting, step illumination, facade washing, driveway ground lights, and underwater fittings for a pool or water feature, all within a single scheme, all needing to feel visually unified.
Hunza provides a specific, purpose-designed product for each of these applications, and critically, the range is designed as a cohesive family. Proportions, finishes, and light quality are consistent across product types, which matters enormously when multiple fixture types meet within the same scheme.
Spike and pole-mounted spotlights
The workhorses of residential exterior design. Products like the Euro Single Pole Light and the Border Light are precisely engineered for uplighting trees, shrubs, and architectural features, discreet by day, delivering beautifully controlled beams of light by night.
Step and recessed deck lights
Disappear into the architecture during daylight hours and provide clean, glare-free illumination of external staircases and deck edges after dark. The Step Light range handles this with a precision that cheaper alternatives cannot match.
Wall-mounted fittings
From the Wall Spot and Euro Wall Down Light to the Twin Wall Spot, these handle facade lighting, entrance illumination, and wall washing. The range covers everything from a discreet downlight above a front door to dramatic side-lit stone cladding on a contemporary extension.
Path, tier, and bollard lights
Provide low-level, pedestrian-scale illumination that guides movement through a space without over-lighting it or creating the harsh glare that characterises poorly designed exterior schemes. Our Hunza Bollard range is ideal for gardens, driveways, and walkways.
Ground and inground fittings
Serve both residential driveways and commercial applications, handling vehicular loads and providing dramatic uplighting effects from flush installations in paving. The Hunza Pure LED Lawn Light is a favourite for exactly this purpose.
Underwater lighting
For pools, ponds, and water features, the Hunza underwater range meets the stringent electrical safety requirements for submerged applications while delivering the warm, high-quality light that makes water come alive at night.
Why We Only Install Low Voltage — And Why It Matters
This is a position we hold firmly, and it is one of the things that most clearly distinguishes a specialist exterior lighting installation from a general electrical job.
At Moonlight Design, all of our exterior lighting schemes are designed and installed using low voltage systems. We do not install 230V mains voltage for landscape lighting. Our reasons are grounded in safety, quality, and long-term practicality.
Safety first. Gardens are dynamic environments. Ground shifts over time. Roots move. Landscaping work is carried out years after an installation without full knowledge of what lies beneath. A 230V cable buried in a garden represents a genuine and serious risk — to future gardeners, to groundworkers, and to anyone who subsequently breaks ground in that space. Low voltage systems, operating at 12V, carry no such risk. This is not overcaution. It is the correct and responsible approach to exterior electrical installation, and it is the standard our electricians, all of whom are specialists in exterior lighting, employed directly by Moonlight Design work to.
Installation precision. Mains voltage installations require conduit, armoured cable, and the physical infrastructure to contain and protect it. This adds bulk, inflexibility, and significant cost. It also constrains the installation process: fitting positions are dictated by where conduit has been laid, rather than where the light effect demands they be. Low voltage cabling gives our electricians the flexibility to finesse positions during installation, responding to the actual conditions of the site rather than a plan drawn at a desk.
Long-term flexibility. A low voltage system built around quality LED drivers is easy to adapt, extend, and maintain. Adding a fitting to an existing scheme is straightforward. Replacing an LED engine after years of use is a simple, in-situ operation. The architecture serves the design rather than constraining it.
Smart Control: Integrating Hunza with Leading Control Platforms
The most carefully specified exterior lighting scheme is only as good as the system that controls it. Over 23 years we have integrated Hunza low voltage installations with every major control platform used in premium residential and commercial projects in the UK. This is an area where our depth of experience is genuinely difficult to replicate.
Lutron is the benchmark for lighting control in high-end residential projects, and Hunza's dimmable PURE LED range integrates cleanly with Lutron's DALI and 0-10V dimming protocols. For clients with whole-home Lutron systems, exterior lighting becomes part of the same scene architecture as interior lighting a single button press transitions the entire property from day to evening mode, inside and out.
Crestron and Control 4 are the platforms of choice in fully integrated smart home environments, where exterior lighting sits alongside AV, HVAC, security, and access control within a single automation ecosystem. We have completed projects where Hunza exterior lighting responds automatically to security triggers, time-of-day schedules, occupancy sensing, and scene control all managed from a unified Control 4 or Crestron interface.
Rako provides an excellent wireless dimming solution particularly well suited to retrofit projects, or to properties where running additional control cabling is impractical. Its wireless architecture, combined with the dimmability of Hunza PURE LED, allows sophisticated multi-zone exterior schemes to be controlled with minimal disruption to the existing fabric of a building.
KNX, the open-standard building automation protocol, is preferred by commercial clients and many architects working on complex projects. We have delivered Hunza installations within KNX building management systems across both commercial and residential projects, where the scale and interoperability of KNX makes it the natural choice for managing lighting alongside other building systems.
Shelly and similar IP-based smart devices offer an accessible, cost-effective route to programmable exterior lighting control for clients who want intelligent functionality scheduled switching, sunrise/sunset automation, remote access via app, without committing to a full proprietary platform.
From Private Gardens to Award-Winning Commercial Schemes
The majority of our work is residential private gardens, driveways, and exterior spaces for homeowners who want their property to look its best after dark. But the principles that make Hunza the right choice for a family garden make it equally compelling for commercial and institutional projects, where the demands are, if anything, even more rigorous.
Our exterior lighting scheme at Dulwich College, one of London's most prestigious independent schools was recognised with a lighting design award, and Hunza fittings were central to the specification. The brief demanded fittings that would perform reliably in a high-footfall, institutional environment, with minimal ongoing maintenance, across a site with a complex mix of historic and contemporary architecture. Hunza met every element of that brief without compromise.
23 Years. One Standard. No Compromises.
The lighting industry has no shortage of products that look the part in a brochure. Our job, and the reason clients and specifiers come to us is to know the difference between what photographs well and what performs, year after year, through everything a British climate throws at it.
We have been specifying, installing, and standing behind Hunza lighting since 2003. We buy directly from Light Ideas, the sole European importers of Hunza, which means we have direct access to the full range, the latest product developments, and the technical support of the people who know this product most deeply. We have seen fittings we installed twenty years ago still performing in schemes we can visit today. We have upgraded LED engines in fittings installed before PURE LED technology existed, extending their life for another decade without touching the body or the wiring. We have watched copper fittings develop the kind of patina that makes a garden feel as though the light has always been part of it.
That accumulated experience, in our design team, in our electricians, in our relationship with the product over two decades of real-world use, is what makes Moonlight Design the most knowledgeable Hunza specialists in the UK. We don't just stock these lights. We design with them, install them, and take full responsibility for every scheme we deliver.
If you are planning an exterior lighting project and want it done with the right product, the right installation, and the right expertise behind it, we'd be glad to talk.
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