Now that the studio is habitable, we have twice had guests arrive to stay in it at night. It occurred to me that it’s probably challenging for people. We live on a paved county road, and when you come into the main house we have landscape lighting that makes it pretty apparent where you need to go. To get to the studio, however, you have to turn off the paved road onto a dark, two-rut dirt road that immediately crosses a fairly deep, dark, tropically-forested gulch. Dark. Then there are long stretches of fence on either side of the road, with no lighting or signage. I realized, even with car lights on, it might not be easy to tell where our gate is.
I put a small solar fence light on the post on the distal, opening side of the studio gate. It’s not much, but I think it makes the location of the gate much more obvious and should decrease the anxiety of folks looking for it. There’s also a combination cable lock on the gate, and the light will make it possible to see to set the combo even if car headlights aren’t pointed toward it… or if you’re walking, which we sometimes are if we’ve gone to visit the neighbors and talked story until the sun went down.
—2p