After sunset the gate light is what the street, the autorickshaw and the late courier actually see. I noticed it properly once I started going on deliveries, driving to addresses across Uttar Pradesh and watching our fittings come on in the evening on homes we had supplied.
A flickering CFL in an iron fitting and a steady warm LED in a cast aluminium lantern do not look like the same house from the road.
What the street sees after dark
People spend the budget on daytime paint, the gate design and the driveway. Guests and passersby often see the house first at night, when the gate light is on and the rest of the elevation is dark. The fitting they see was still a choice, even when nobody sat down and made it.
Colour temperature
Aim for 2700K, and no higher than about 3000K. That is warm white, the tone of a traditional incandescent bulb and the colour of evening. Anything above 4000K starts to look clinical, and at 6500K (cool daylight) your home looks like a petrol station forecourt at night.
The same gate light fitted with a 2700K LED and with a 6500K LED looks like two different products. For a home entrance we fit 2700K to 3000K. The colour temperature costs nothing extra, and the wrong one makes an expensive light look cheap. The bulb is the easy correction. The body is the one you live with.
The gate and the light should agree
An ornate wrought-iron gate next to a sleek brushed-steel light fights itself. A simple painted steel gate next to an antique gold cast aluminium lantern usually sits quietly. Decide which of those you want. We always ask what the gate style is, what the pillars are made of, and what colour the exterior wall is. Those answers matter more than a favourite catalogue page. A light that looks right on its own can look wrong on a particular home.
The finishes we coat are antique gold, antique copper, matte black and raw grey. Antique gold is forgiving beside traditional ironwork, and matte black suits a flatter contemporary elevation. Iron and aluminium can match in daylight, but after wet seasons the iron one streaks the plaster. That comparison is in the material note.
The door light and the gate light are different jobs
People use "the light outside" to mean three different fittings. The head on the pillar is a gate light, sized to the cap, and the models are on the gate lights range. The lantern on the wall beside the leaf, or on the porch return, is a wall light. Its problem is the centre mark: too low and it glares, too high and the step goes dark. That is covered in where to mark a wall lantern. A soffit over the door may want a pendant instead, and the drop is covered in how far a porch pendant should hang. Ordering a second gate head because the door looks bare is how an elevation ends up with a duplicate.
The holder on our outdoor pieces is B22 unless the quote says otherwise, and the bulb is separate unless we wrote it in.
What to send
If you are unsure which job you have, send a photo of the gate and the door wall together to WhatsApp +91 70176 62533, and include the pillar width if a head sits on the cap. One to five pieces are at retail list, and the trade desk is described on About. The printable codes are in Padma_Catalogue_2026.pdf. We have cast these fittings in Aligarh since 1990, in the workshop Yogendra and Dharmendra started.