Exterior lighting is the lighting mounted on the building — soffit and eave fixtures, entry and garage lights, wall sconces, floods and security lighting. It points outward and down, away from the house, and its job is practical: getting to the door, finding the lock, seeing the step, backing out of the garage, being able to tell who is standing on the porch.
The single most common mistake is one bright fixture. A floodlight on a corner feels like the obvious answer and it makes the property harder to see, not easier. Your eye adjusts to the brightest thing in view, so everything beyond the lit circle goes black — and the step you were worried about is now in the part your eye has given up on. A house with one flood on it is often less navigable after dark than a house with four modest fixtures spread along it.
So the approach is more fixtures at lower output, shielded so the light goes down rather than sideways, warm rather than blue. That reads as a lit house instead of a lit parking lot, and it is also what keeps light off the neighbor's bedroom window and out of the sky — which on this side of the divide people notice, because the stars here are one of the reasons to live here.
A few things worth deciding together rather than one at a time. Which lights come on with a switch inside, which run on a photocell from dusk, and which come on only when something moves — the mix is what decides whether the system actually gets used. Where the address numbers are and whether they can be read from the road, which matters on a night somebody is looking for your house in a hurry. And whether the garage, the back door and the side gate are covered, because those are the three that get left out and then get added badly later.
Where the line falls on a job like this is voltage, not position on the building. A great deal of building-mounted lighting runs at low voltage off the same kind of transformer as the fixtures in the yard — soffit washes, step lights, entry and sconce fixtures — and that work we do ourselves, start to finish. Where a fixture has to be wired into the house at line voltage and code calls for a licensed electrician, we refer you to one. We are not an electrical contractor and we do not hold an electrical license; what we do carry is listed on our credentials page.
What this will not do is make the house look like anything. Light coming off a wall flattens that wall — there is no shadow, no depth, nothing picked out. If what you want is the property to look like something after dark, that comes from fixtures standing out in the landscape aiming back at it, which is landscape lighting. Most properties want some of each, and they are not substitutes for one another.